China's Tencent to unveil AI chatbot after Beijing clears hurdles

China's internet giant Tencent Holdings said that it will unveil an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot on Thursday, according to a social media post it published on Wednesday.

The post featured a demo conversation a user had with the AI chatbot, which helped the user write promotional materials.

It comes after China started to approve AI chatbots for public release last month. Other big tech companies in China including Baidu Inc and SenseTime Group released their AI chatbots last week.


Tencent has been developing its own AI model named "Hunyuan" for months and the company said last month that it was expanding the test of the model internally.

Reuters reported in February that the company formed a team to develop a ChatGPT-like chatbot named "HunyuanAide" at the time.

Tencent's shares were down around 1% on Wednesday, lagging a 0.5% drop in the broader market.