China's Tencent teases launch of AI chatbot as craze gathers pace

HONG KONG, Sept 6 (Reuters) - China's internet giant Tencent Holdings (0700.HK) teased the launch of an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot on Wednesday through a social media post as a race among Chinese firms to develop such tech heats up.

The Shenzhen-based company published a post on WeChat on Wednesday to drum up hype for a two-day summit it will kick off on Thursday. The post featured a demo conversation a user had with an AI chatbot, which helped the user write promotional materials.

The company also added a new mini program named "HunyuanAide" to WeChat, although it remained inaccessible to the public as of Wednesday. Reuters reported in February that the company formed a team to develop a ChatGPT-like chatbot named "HunyuanAide".

This comes after China started to approve AI chatbots for public release last month. Other big tech companies in China including Baidu Inc (9888.HK) and SenseTime Group (0200.HK) 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.

Tencent's shares were down around 0.43% on Wednesday in Hong Kong while the broader market remained flat.

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