New: AI API Cost Calculator — compare GPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok & Llama pricing live
Developers · News

Tencent's Hy4 Can See and Use Your Computer — Explained Honestly

By ToolsDig Research · November 4, 2026 · How we research

Nothing here is sponsored — no affiliate links on this page. This breaking article is not the daily buyer-intent post. Facts below come from the sources listed at the end, checked 4 November 2026. We have not tested Hy4 hands-on, and nothing here is a hands-on finding.

Abstract illustration of an AI model working on a computer desktop with floating panels showing charts, diagrams and images, in deep navy and teal with warm amber accents

Tencent has released Hy4, its new-generation large language model — and this one is different from its predecessors in two ways that actually matter to developers. It is the first model in Tencent's Hunyuan line that can see: fine-grained image processing, complex chart analysis, mathematical visual reasoning. And it is the first that can use a computer: operating a machine through its graphical interface and command line, combining perception, deep reasoning and tool invocation.

Hy4 succeeds the Hy4 preview from late August 2026, and the scale jump is large: 770 billion total parameters in a mixture-of-experts architecture, up from Hy3's 295 billion — a 2.6x increase. It is available now through Tencent's own surfaces — Tencent Cloud TokenHub, WorkBuddy/CodeBuddy, Yuanbao, ima, and the WeCom intelligent assistant Dayuan — and through APIs on OpenRouter, Hermes and OpenCode. The weights themselves are not out yet: Tencent says they will be open-sourced soon, and a lighter Hy4 Flash version focused on speed and cost is also coming soon. Neither has a date in the reporting, and this article does not invent one.

That distinction — available now as a service, not yet open as weights — is the first thing to keep straight, because much of the coverage of Hy4 leans on Tencent's framing of it as an open-weight model. Right now, what you can actually use is the hosted model. The open part is a promise, not a download.

🔍 How we put this together

We verified the story against multiple 4 November 2026 reports — SCMP, PANews, ChainCatcher, Wedoany and Longbridge — and cross-checked the scale, capabilities, availability and pricing across them, keeping each price labelled by its source. We have not run Hy4 ourselves, so nothing here is a hands-on finding. Where a claim is Tencent's own framing, we label it as exactly that, and where the announcement gives no number or date, we say so.
🏆 Verdict: Hy4 is a big, serious release: a 770-billion-parameter model that can see and can use a computer, available now across Tencent's surfaces and third-party gateways, with open weights promised soon. But the two things that would make it genuinely open and genuinely evaluable — the weights themselves, and independent test results — are both still to come. Try it free in WorkBuddy/CodeBuddy before 15 November if you are curious, watch for the weights release and its licence, and judge the vision and Computer Use claims when testers outside Tencent have had their hands on it.

What it is

Hy4 is Tencent's flagship Hunyuan model, a 770-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts system. Mixture-of-experts means only a fraction of those parameters activates for any given token, which is how a model of this size stays servable at all — the headline number is total capacity, not per-token compute, and it should not be compared directly with a dense model's parameter count.

Two capabilities are new to the Hunyuan line, and both are worth understanding separately:

Around those two, Tencent reports stronger instruction following, better long-document understanding, and longer-horizon agent task execution. The context window is listed at 1,048,576 tokens on OpenRouter's listing — a million-token window, in the same class as the largest frontier models. That figure comes from a gateway listing, not from Tencent's own announcement materials quoted in the coverage, so treat it as a listing figure rather than a vendor-confirmed spec.

What you can actually use today — and what is only promised

This is the distinction this article turns on, so here it is plainly:

Tencent's own framing — labelled as Tencent's, not as an independent finding — is that this is the first time its line-up is "one of the strongest open-weight models available today", while trailing leading closed models on research maths, long-horizon coding, self-improvement and advanced visual QA. That is a notably candid self-assessment for a launch announcement, and it is worth taking at face value: even on Tencent's own account, Hy4 is not claiming the top of the field, and the areas where it trails — research maths, long-horizon coding — are exactly the areas developers tend to care most about.

One independent data point, also labelled: the South China Morning Post reports that the Hy4 preview ranked 23rd globally on Code Arena's WebDev leaderboard. That is the preview, not Hy4 itself, and it is SCMP's report of a third-party leaderboard — not a benchmark we have run or verified.

Pricing — labelled by source, not blended

Pricing for a model like this is where coverage most often goes wrong, by mixing a vendor price, a gateway price and a promotion into one number. So here they are separately:

No other pricing has been invented here. If you are comparing Hy4 against another model on cost, compare like with like: Tencent's direct price against other vendors' direct prices, or gateway prices against gateway prices.

Why it matters

Three things make Hy4 worth attention even before the weights arrive. First, vision plus computer use in one flagship model from a major lab is a statement about where the field is going: a single system that perceives a screen, reasons about it, and acts on it. Second, the open-weights promise matters for the ecosystem if it lands — though a 770-billion-parameter model is a data-centre-scale artefact, and the gap between "announced as open-weight" and "weights actually published" is where many launches quietly stall, so watch for the licence and the actual download. Third, the competitive context is real: the coverage frames Hy4 against an intensifying open-weight race involving DeepSeek, Zai and Alibaba, and Tencent is clearly positioning Hunyuan as a serious contender in that race.

Who it matters for

The limits — stated plainly

The bottom line is a measured one. Hy4 is a major hosted launch with an open promise attached: judge the vision and Computer Use claims when testers outside Tencent have had their hands on it, and watch for the weights release and its licence. Until then, treat Hy4 as exactly what it is today — available to try, not yet open to verify.

Sources: South China Morning Post, 4 November 2026, "Tencent unveils Hy4" (SCMP); PANews (PANews); ChainCatcher (ChainCatcher); Wedoany (Wedoany); Longbridge (Longbridge). Tencent's framing and the SCMP WebDev ranking are labelled as such in the article. No hands-on testing was performed for this article. This breaking article is not the daily buyer-intent post, and it contains no affiliate links.