Tencent’s Hunyuan T1 AI reasoning model rivals DeepSeek in performance and price

The tech giant’s latest offering leverages large-scale reinforcement learning, rivalling DeepSeek in top benchmark tests

Tencent Holdings has unveiled a new artificial intelligence (AI) reasoning model, Hunyuan T1, that rivals DeepSeek’s R1 in both performance and pricing.

The Chinese technology giant’s latest offering, launched on Friday, leverages large-scale reinforcement learning, a technique also employed by DeepSeek in its R1 reasoning model, which launched in January.

The release is an official version of the model after a beta run of T1-preview on its chatbot Yuanbao. It scored 87.2 points on the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) Pro benchmark, a test that gauges a model’s knowledge. That bested DeepSeek-R1’s 84 points but trailed the 89.3 points achieved by OpenAI’s o1, the reasoning model that the ChatGPT maker launched in December.