BEIJING - Tencent Holdings said on Thursday companies could now use its large language artificial intelligence (AI) model "Hunyuan" as it premiered the much-awaited product amid a race by tech firms to become China's AI champion.

The Chinese tech giant and owner of the WeChat social media platform conducted a demonstration before a live audience at a conference in Shenzhen, and said Hunyuan had become the foundation of more than 50 of its products and services.

"By July, there are more than 130 large language models in China," Jiang Jie, Tencent's vice president, said. "A war of a hundred models has begun."

Hunyuan's debut comes after several Chinese tech firms including Baidu Inc and SenseTime Group recently unveiled their own AI models.

Tencent, China's most valuable internet company, said Hunyuan had more than 100 billion parameters and was trained with more than 2 trillion tokens, two metrics often used to measure AI models' power.

OpenAI's GPT-3 AI model contained 175 billion parameters in 2020 and Meta Platform Inc's Llama 2 model had 70 billion parameters in 2023.

Tencent said its model, capable of conversing in both Chinese and English, was "better" than OpenAI's ChatGPT in areas such as writing long text with thousands of words and solving certain math problems.

The model also experiences 30% less hallucination compared to Llama 2, Tencent added. AI experts often describe moments where AI models generate incorrect information but present it as if it was a fact as "hallucination".

There was no independent verification of Tencent's claims. ChatGPT and Meta were not immediately available for comment.

(Reporting by Josh Ye in Hong Kong, Additional reporting by the Beijing Newsroom; Editing by Christopher Cushing and Miral Fahmy)