Tencent Extends Hunyuan Hy3 Free Trial After User Demand Surge

Tencent is giving users two more weeks of free access to its Hy3 AI model. The company’s PR director Zhang Jun announced on Weibo Sunday that the free trial — originally set to end this week — will run through August 5 for WorkBuddy and CodeBuddy users, following what he described as overwhelming demand from the community.

The reprieve covers the two professional use cases where Hy3 has seen the heaviest adoption: workplace productivity tools and code assistance. It’s a telling signal — when users actively campaign to keep access to a model instead of quietly abandoning it, the product is probably onto something.

Tencent open-sourced Hy3 on July 6. The model uses a Mixture-of-Experts architecture with 295 billion total parameters, of which 21 billion are active per inference. That sparse-activation design keeps inference costs manageable while still benefiting from the broader parameter base. The model supports a 256,000-token context window — enough to process entire codebases or lengthy technical documents in a single pass.

The company says Hy3 builds on its preview release with improved post-training data quality and diversity, plus expanded reinforcement learning compute. The result, according to Tencent’s benchmarks, is a model that competes with flagship systems two to five times its parameter count — the kind of efficiency gain that matters when inference cost per token still determines whether an application is viable at scale.

Hy3’s architecture is relatively unusual for a major Chinese AI lab. Most large models from Tencent’s peers lean toward dense architectures with uniform parameter activation. Tencent’s bet is that MoE’s sparsity — routing each token through only a fraction of the total parameters — delivers better performance-to-cost ratios for the workloads (reasoning, agentic tasks, long-context comprehension) that define the current frontier.

Whether the model retains momentum after the free period ends will be the real test. But for now, Tencent is capitalizing on the attention while it can.