Tencent hires engineers from ByteDance’s Seed AI team

Tencent has recruited several senior engineers from ByteDance’s Seed AI team as it ramps up work on its in-house large language models, according to a report.

The hires include people focused on visual AI platforms, infrastructure engineering, training infrastructure, and reinforcement learning algorithms, according to the report.

The moves come ahead of Tencent’s planned launch of its next-generation Hunyuan 3.0 system in Q2 2026.

Tencent is positioning Hunyuan 3.0 to compete with leading global models such as GPT-4.5, the report said.

🔗 Source: TechNode

🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

ByteDance’s Seed team has been building science-focused foundation models

ByteDance’s Seed team builds science foundation models that cover biology, physics, and chemistry 1.
ByteDance has recruited PhD candidates and graduates for Seed roles in U.S. hubs such as Seattle and San Jose 2, 1.
The expertise Tencent is hiring could support scientific and visual modeling infrastructure, which could push Tencent’s Hunyuan 3.0 work beyond general chat into science and vision use cases.

Tencent’s hiring fits its broader push to deploy AI across products

Tencent said investment in two new AI products, Hunyuan and Yuanbao, totaled 18 billion yuan in 2025, with spending on Hunyuan, Yuanbao, and other new AI products expected to at least double by 2026 3.
The spending also targets product rollouts, including a WeChat AI agent, software that can carry out tasks on a user’s behalf, that aims to coordinate work across mini-programs and WeChat Pay inside the app 4.
Tencent has released the Hunyuan 3D creation engine, which generates 3D assets from multimodal inputs such as text and images 5. It also open-sourced HunyuanImage-3.0, which uses a Mixture-of-Experts architecture, an approach that routes each request to a subset of specialized model components, with 80 billion total parameters and 13 billion activated per token 6.