Tencent (Hunyuan)

OpenRouter’s weekly leaderboard, computed from the token bucket ending 16 September, puts Tencent’s Hy4 preview second in the world at 12 trillion tokens, behind OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Luna at 17.3 trillion and ahead of every DeepSeek build. Eight of the top ten models are Chinese: GLM 5.3 Flash from Z.ai at 11.3 trillion, DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 at 11.2, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash at 10.3, Xiaomi’s MiMo-V2.5 at 7.83, Tencent’s older Hy3 at 4.47, an April build of DeepSeek V4 Flash at 4.24, Nvidia’s Nemotron 3 Ultra at 3.49 and GLM 5.3 at 2.46. The Chinese entries carry 63.8 trillion tokens against 20.79 trillion for the two American ones, a ratio of 3.07, which was recomputed from OpenRouter’s own published figures rather than taken from the Sina piece that ran the same claim that morning. Pricing pulled from OpenRouter’s models API in the same session changes how the table reads: Hy4 preview costs 83.4 cents per million prompt tokens and 2 dollars 50 per million completion tokens, while the Nvidia entry at ninth is the variant published at zero, so one of the two American models in the world’s top ten by usage is free. The second half of the issue runs the other way. Leiphone reported as an exclusive, citing people it did not name, that Yao Xingcheng, who ran pre-training for Tencent’s Hunyuan large language model and left in July, has joined Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab, and put the Tencent package in the tens of millions of yuan a year. That is one outlet’s sourcing on an unannounced move and is unconfirmed elsewhere, so the salary figure is loose and only the direction of travel is firm. The same outlet published a second piece arguing that Chinese platforms hiring pre-training researchers out of Google’s Gemini team have mostly bought seniority rather than the undocumented judgement calls that decide whether a training run works. In the Briefing: Insta360 grew first-half revenue 50.29 percent to 5.517 billion yuan while net profit fell 94.15 percent, and subtracting its filed first quarter from the half leaves a second-quarter net loss of 54.2 million yuan that no outlet printed; Huawei announced the Ascend 960 SuperPoD at Huawei Connect, up to 4,096 NPU cards and 8 exaflops of FP8, on the claim that chip-to-chip communication eats more than 40 percent of training time in a 100,000-card cluster; and Zhipu disclosed that a GLM-5.3-driven Infra Agent did much of the engineering on its own inference stack, which chief scientist Tang Jie calls an early form of recursive self-improvement.

DeepSeek posted about 150 openings on 8 September and not one of them is a research role, per a WeChat notice read closely by QbitAI and republished by 36Kr. They split into server-side development engineers across six directions, which are the large-model research platform, Agent framework components, R&D efficiency infrastructure, the DeepSeek API, online serving and data engineering, and agent elastic-compute engineers across two, platform development and low-level systems, with a target profile of senior backend people two to ten years in. QbitAI puts the whole company at 300 to 500 people, so a single round is worth somewhere between a quarter and a half of existing headcount, hired into one function; an investor at a front-line firm told Sina Tech the goal for this year is 1,000 people, which would put DeepSeek level with Zhipu, whose 2025 prospectus listed 883 employees. What the 150 are being hired to build has a name: DSec, for DeepSeek Elastic Compute, disclosed for the first time in the V4 technical report as three Rust components, an API gateway called Apiserver, an Edge agent on every host machine and a cluster monitor called Watcher, wired over a homemade RPC protocol on top of 3FS, the distributed filesystem DeepSeek open-sourced last year. Cui Tianyi, who runs the DeepSeek Harness team, gave the reason in one sentence: scale produces complexity, and the complexity turns around and demands more scale. Underneath it is the money. Reuters reported on 9 September that DeepSeek has hired CITIC Securities to prepare a listing on Shanghai’s STAR Market and aims to start the process this year, which TechNode carried the same morning; Sina’s wire adds that CITIC has made contact and entered due diligence, that the two sides have not signed a formal listing-tutoring agreement, and that DeepSeek has said nothing officially.

BYD, the world’s largest EV maker, published its first AI paper. HyWorldVLA, a two-branch driving world model, scored 90.59 on the public NAVSIM v1 self-driving benchmark, which BYD’s paper reports as the top score posted on it, and held a 19-point lead over the strongest baseline across 655 rain-and-fog scenes. Paired with the in-house Xuanji A3, which BYD calls China’s first 4nm automotive-grade driving chip at about 700 TOPS, it gives BYD its own data, model and silicon stack. The benchmark record is not yet a shipping product and BYD has named no deployment date.

A product-less humanoid startup hit a billion-dollar valuation, built by Huawei’s former self-driving lead. China’s autonomous-driving talent is transplanting into robots.

Moore Threads open-sourced MusaCoder-27B-RL, a code model trained end to end on its own MTT S5000 GPU cluster, and reported it scoring above Claude Opus 4.7 on KernelBench. The signal was less the score than a domestic GPU completing a full from-scratch training loop.