Chinese tech company Tencent is capitalising on its artificial intelligence (AI) development as a key driver of its cloud business.
The company launched its proprietary foundation AI model Hunyuan on Sept 7 to join the generative AI race, in a bid to automate human work and increase human productivity.
AI will continue to be a key driver for cloud growth with increasing demand from enterprises to build and train their own models, Dowson Tong, senior executive vice-president of Tencent and chief executive of Tencent Cloud and Smart Industries Group, said at the Tencent Digital Ecosystem Summit 2023, an annual event held from Sept 5-8 in Shenzhen, China.
Tencent also offers the large language model Hunyuan for enterprise applications. Enterprises in China may now access Hunyuan via Tencent's public cloud platform and fine-tune it to their specific needs. The platform features strong Chinese language processing abilities, advanced logical reasoning, and comes with reliable task execution abilities.
Tencent's foundation model supports a wide array of functions spanning the creation of images, copywriting, text recognition, and customer service. These will be instrumental in key industries like finance, public services, social media, e-commerce, transportation, tourism and games.
This empowers enterprises to build powerful tools and apps with it, in addition to training their own unique large models derived from Tencent's Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) offering which was first introduced in June this year.
The MaaS provides enterprises with economically viable, industry-specific large models, featuring over 50 solutions from cloud, advertising and fintech games, spanning 20 major industries. This creates a virtuous cycle in which enterprises refine their large models with Hunyuan to create uniquely intelligent services across their operations.
Hunyuan has also been connected to 50 of Tencent's own products, ranging from Tencent Cloud to Tencent Games, Tencent Fintech, and Tencent Meeting.
"Overall, AI is not just one single product but a great capability that can be leveraged and instrumented into different applications to serve different business scenarios," Mr Tong said.
He added that AI capabilities enhance productivity in various use cases, including collaborative applications like Tencent's VooV Meeting cloud-based conferencing solutions.
For example, users can benefit from AI-generated meeting minutes, which summarise an hour-long conversation within 10 seconds and significantly enhance user productivity.
"We focus on customers' business scenarios to develop industry-specific AI models, using either our proprietary models or open-source alternatives based on customer preferences," said Mr Tong.
According to Tencent vice-president Jie Jiang, the company has entered the era of the comprehensive embrace of large models, with Tencent having evolved over the years from model algorithms to machine learning frameworks, and now to AI infrastructure. The Hunyuan model currently has over 100 billion parameters, with more than 2 trillion tokens in pre-training data.
Mr Tong said the global cloud computing market continues to be a bright spot for Tencent Cloud. In the first half of 2023, Tencent Cloud's international business posted double-digit revenue growth, with particularly strong results in Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Europe, and the Middle East.
"As we enter our seventh year of operating in international markets, our expansion strategy is to support Chinese enterprises going overseas, while concurrently facilitating the entry of foreign businesses into China," Mr Tong said at the summit.
"This year, we also added more development teams in global markets spanning Latin America and the Middle East, to name just a few."
Tencent Cloud's international business expansion strategy revolves around three pillars: capability enhancement and product internationalisation, enhancing partners and the ecosystem, and driving innovation in immersive convergence. It provides solutions spanning industries such as internet, gaming, finance, tourism and hospitality, automotive, and retail.
With the launch of Hunyuan and a thriving international business, Tencent is committed to open collaboration in the ecosystem, with domestic businesses benefitting from the company's model services, while international businesses leverage Tencent to access the Chinese market, in addition to undertaking their own digital transformations using Tencent products and services, according to Mr Tong.
Mr Tong added that over the past few years, perception of the cloud technology has changed from only a tool to enhance operations and cost efficiency to be a catalyst for digital transformation, business success, and enhanced cybersecurity.
With digital transformation ramping up in Southeast Asia, he sees more organisations in Thailand and the region opting for cloud solutions and multi-cloud deployment as part of their core business strategy, to drive innovation and keep up with consumer demand.
"The merging of physical and digital worlds is also transforming the way we live and work, as well as how businesses operate. In the era of immersive convergence, we can expect a greater demand for immersive experiences, open collaboration and seamless integration between offline and online realms," Mr Tong said.
In terms of the competition among cloud players, he believes every company has its own focus and competitive advantage.
"Our main priority is to strive for better cloud services and products to empower enterprises in the digital era, instead of comparing ourselves to industry peers," Mr Tong said.
Tencent has been committed to providing products and services in Thailand for the past 10 years. The company has opened two internet data centres in Bangkok, the first in 2019 and the second in 2021, recognising that cloud adoption has become a priority for local enterprises, he added.
The company has also leveraged its AI techniques and video coding technology to help businesses enhance video quality, especially for users in rural areas with poor and unstable network conditions. It offers Tencent Cloud Lighthouse, a simplified cloud server product that can assist small and medium-sized enterprises on their cloud journey.