Tencent’s AI assistant Yuanbao rises to second on Apple’s free app chart, behind DeepSeek

All businesses under Tencent’s content unit achieved profitability at the end of 2022. Credit: 123RF

Tencent’s AI assistant app Yuanbao has climbed to second place on China’s Apple App Store free app downloads chart, surpassing the ByteDance-developed Doubao. The top spot is held by DeepSeek, which has maintained its dominance since launching in late January. Yuanbao’s rise follows a series of significant updates since it announced support for both DeepSeek and Tencent’s own Hunyuan model on Feb. 13. On Feb. 21, Tencent introduced a new feature in Yuanbao powered by DeepSeek: the ability to understand images. Users can now send any image to the app and Yuanbao will analyze and interpret the content.

Developed based on Tencent’s Hunyuan large language model, Yuanbao is an AI designed to excel in Chinese language understanding, logical reasoning, and task execution. Tencent describes Hunyuan as a practical model with robust capabilities for content creation and analysis. [Jiemian, in Chinese]