Tencent (0700) released its latest and best image-generation model, Hy Image 3.5 Preview, on Tuesday, the same day rival Alibaba (9988) hosted its annual Apsara conference focused on artificial intelligence.
The Hy Image 3.5 Preview model boasts a 30 percent performance uplift compared with its predecessor Hy Image 3.0, and is being integrated across Tencent’s products including the Yuanbao chatbot and film-editing and design tools, the company said.
The new model delivered performance on par with ByteDance's Seedream 5.0 Pro and slightly outperformed Nano Banana Pro from Alphabet's Google and Alibaba's Qwen-Image-3.0 Pro in tests conducted by hundreds of in-house professional designers, it added.
Meta's AI‑agent Muse has exploded in popularity in the US as the top free app on the US Apple iOS App and Google Play stores as of Monday. It can create customized AI agents to help users complete tasks such as responding based on their social content like Facebook Marketplace and Instagram, and connecting to third-party services like Gmail, Apple and Google calendars, OpenTable or other websites via a browser.
This draws a clear market parallel: Tencent, with its dominant social ecosystem and high‑frequency everyday‑life scenario entry points, is viewed as the best‑positioned company to roll out China’s counterpart to Muse.
Tencent's shares climbed as much as 6 percent by noon before trimming gains to roughly 5 percent at Tuesday's close, at HK$451.6.
Frank Feng
