WAIC Shanghai: Tencent, SenseTime unveil latest AI models to stir up rivalry

Tencent Holdings and SenseTime launched new artificial intelligence (AI) models at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai on Sunday as Chinese Big Tech companies stepped up their rivalry in the field.

Shenzhen-based social media and gaming powerhouse Tencent unveiled its Hunyuan 3D World Model 1.0, an open-source AI model capable of generating detailed three-dimensional environments, according to a statement. SenseTime, an AI pioneer in China, launched SenseNova V6.5, a new generation of its proprietary AI model series.

Tencent said its latest Hunyuan model could create interactive, 360-degree virtual 3D scenes using natural language prompts or image inputs, thus significantly simplifying the production process for virtual reality experiences and video games.

Tencent said Hunyuan was the industry’s first open-source 3D world-generation AI fully compatible with “CG pipelines” – the standard workflow used for creating 3D graphics and animations in film production, gaming and visual effects.

An image generated by Tencent’s Hunyuan3D World Model 1.0, unveiled at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on July 27, 2025. Photo: Handout

Meanwhile, SenseTime claimed SenseNova V6.5 had outperformed some of its US peers such as Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro and Anthropic’s Claude 4-Sonnet. Its unveiling marked the Hong Kong-listed firm’s latest efforts to double down on multimodal AI models, chairman and CEO Xu Li said at the WAIC venue.

The introduction followed months after it launched the previous version called SenseNova V6, a multimodal model released in April that had outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-4o across several metrics.

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