Tencent launches T1 reasoning model amid growing AI competition in China

Shanghai: Chinese tech giant Tencent on Friday night launched the official version of its T1 reasoning model, stepping up competition in China's increasingly crowded artificial intelligence sector.

The upgraded T1 model offers faster response times and enhanced capabilities for processing extended text documents, the company said in a post on its official WeChat account.

T1 can "keep the content logic clear and the text neat and clean", the post said, while the hallucination rate is "extremely low".

The launch comes amid heightened rivalry in China's AI landscape following DeepSeek's introduction of models that offer comparable or superior performance to Western systems at substantially lower costs.

Tencent had previously released a preview version of T1 through platforms, including its AI assistant application Yuanbao.

The official version will be powered by Tencent's Turbo S foundational language model, unveiled late last month, which the company claims processes queries faster than rival DeepSeek's R1 model.

A chart published in the post comparing the T1 model to DeepSeek R1 showed Tencent's outperformed on some knowledge and reasoning benchmarks.

Tencent has ramped up its AI investments in recent months. On Thursday, the company announced plans to increase capital expenditure in 2025, following already aggressive AI spending throughout 2024.