Tencent has picked up the WizardLM team, a Beijing-based AI research group that had been operating under Microsoft’s aegis. With its unique past, WizardLM is on trial. This follows news that the team had announced failed to include a major step for model releases—checking for toxicity. As things stand, this situation has caused Microsoft to remove WizardLM-2 from the internet. This glaring omission of a basic evaluation begs the question like where was the oversight.
WizardLM became well known for its competitive, free alternatives to major AI models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4. Just prior to their acquisition by Tencent, the group released a new family of AI models, such as WizardLM-2. This model was highly successful, reaching exceptional download rates at over one hundred thousand downloads per month. That unprecedented growth was recently overshadowed by the toxic testing controversy.
The WizardLM team is already doing their part to correct this mistake. They are finalizing the results of toxicity testing and are looking to re-release their model in the near future.
“We accidentally missed an item required in the model release process — toxicity testing.” – WizardLM team
Despite this setback, WizardLM has been active in releasing various AI models, including Hunyuan-TurboS 0416, which reportedly outperforms other open AI models such as Google’s Gemma 3 series. This advancement took place within Hunyuan, one of Tencent’s focused AI development entities.
Their transition to Tencent has coincided with the company tripling or quadrupling its AI infrastructure spending. Just last week, Tencent restructured its Hunyuan team, forming two new units in an effort to further strengthen its artificial intelligence capabilities. WizardLM senior researcher Can Xu who was a lead or major contributor on all three projects. He’s now on board with Hunyuan to help lead their AI innovation mission.
Qingfeng Sun, who identifies himself as a co-founder of WizardLM, has been vocal about the latest developments on social media. By underscoring the abilities of Hunyuan-TurboS 0416, he showed the space for creativity and progress emerging from this acquisition.
“[The WizardLM] models were collectively downloaded over a hundred thousand times a month.” – Clément Delangue
WizardLM fits into Tencent’s rapidly growing AI ecosystem. Industry observers will be glued to their screens to see how the new team will meet many of the new challenges while rolling out advanced AI technologies.
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