Analysis
Tencent released Hy3 on July 6, an open-weight, Apache 2.0-licensed model built as a 295 billion parameter mixture-of-experts architecture with only 21 billion parameters active at inference time and a 256K context window. The efficiency framing is the point: Hy3 matches or beats Zhipu's GLM-5.2, a roughly 744 billion parameter model with 40 billion active parameters, on most benchmarks while running at less than half the active-parameter footprint.
On STEM and reasoning tasks, Hy3 reports 90.4 on GPQA Diamond, 72.0 on USAMO 2026, and 90.0 on IMOAnswerBench. In a blind evaluation Tencent ran with 270 experts across disciplines working real-world workflows, collecting 312 valid comparisons, Hy3 scored 2.67 out of 4 against GLM-5.1's 2.51, with its clearest advantages in frontend development, CI/CD and data-and-storage tasks.
The one category where GLM-5.2 still clearly leads is coding accuracy across the full benchmark suite -- Hy3 trades some coding performance for its dramatically smaller active footprint. But on agentic search and tool orchestration, Hy3 leads the entire open field, posting 84.2 on BrowseComp and 91.0 on DeepSearchQA, with a leading 79.1 on the public MCP-Atlas tool-orchestration benchmark.
“On STEM and reasoning tasks, Hy3 reports 90.4 on GPQA Diamond, 72.0 on USAMO 2026, and 90.0 on IMOAnswerBench.”
The release keeps China's open-weight race compounding: Tencent, Zhipu's GLM series, Alibaba's Qwen family and DeepSeek have all shipped rapid iterations through 2025 and 2026, a category where Western frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic remain comparatively less active, generally preferring closed, API-only deployment for their most capable models.
For infrastructure and applications investors, the efficiency angle matters more than the raw benchmark scores: a model matching a much larger rival's performance at under half the active-parameter cost directly lowers inference costs for anyone deploying it, and every such release compounds pricing pressure on closed frontier-lab APIs regardless of where the end customer sits.
What to watch: whether Hy3 closes the remaining coding gap with GLM-5.2 in a near-term follow-up release, and whether Western closed-model labs respond with their own efficiency-focused releases rather than continuing to compete purely on raw capability.
