Yuanbao AI Spring Festival 1 billion red envelopes! Ma Huateng: Hope to recreate the glory of WeChat red envelopes from back in the day

Tencent is attempting to replicate the mobile payment miracle of the past through its strongest social strategies in the increasingly crowded AI arena.

On January 26, Tencent's Chairman Ma Huateng set the tone for 2025 as the "Year of AI" at the company's annual meeting and announced that its AI application "Yuanbao" will launch a cash distribution activity of 1 billion yuan for the Spring Festival starting February 1. Ma Huateng clearly stated that he hopes to recreate the phenomenon of WeChat red envelopes binding hundreds of millions of users through this substantial subsidy. This marks a strategic prioritization of user acquisition and engagement for AI products at the group level.

At the same time, Tencent Yuanbao has quietly initiated an internal test of a social feature called "Yuanbao Pai," which Ma Huateng revealed was previously a "top-secret project." According to media reports, "Yuanbao Pai" allows users to create groups where AI not only acts as an assistant but also deeply participates in social interactions. This move indicates that Tencent is trying to break the current limitation of AI applications as mere efficiency tools, pulling them into high-frequency social scenarios and building a new traffic moat through a "human-machine symbiosis" interaction model.

Analysts point out that Tencent's combination of "heavy subsidies in one hand and social expansion in the other" demonstrates its urgency in the commercialization of AI. After experiencing last year's industry turmoil, Tencent is attempting to leverage its monopolistic advantage in the social chain to accelerate the "lightning transformation" of user AI usage habits in response to fierce challenges from competitors like ByteDance and Baidu in the AI application space.

1 Billion Cash Bet, Aiming to Replicate Payment Battle Miracle

For Tencent, the Spring Festival is often a critical explosion point for its key products. Ma Huateng mentioned at the annual meeting that the upcoming cash distribution activity of 1 billion yuan for Yuanbao aims to replicate the successful path of WeChat Pay in 2015. That year, WeChat successfully bound a massive number of users to its payment ecosystem by distributing hundreds of millions of cash red envelopes through the Spring Festival Gala's "Shake" feature, disrupting the mobile payment landscape.

According to information released by Tencent, this activity will officially launch on February 1. Users can log into the Yuanbao App to participate in the distribution of 1 billion cash red envelopes, with individual red envelopes reaching up to 10,000 yuan. Additionally, there are incentive mechanisms such as the "10,000 yuan small horse card." Currently, the Yuanbao App has updated its version and opened reservations, with users who reserve receiving extra lottery chances.

Market views suggest that Tencent has not participated in large-scale cash subsidy battles for many years, and this substantial investment in Yuanbao highlights the management's determination to not lose ground in the AI arena. By lowering user thresholds through high subsidies and combining this with the high-traffic window of the Spring Festival, Tencent aims to rapidly expand Yuanbao's user base in a short time, providing a fertile ground for its subsequent social exploration.

"Top-Secret Project" Emerges, AI Enters Social Territory

In addition to financial investment, Tencent has also played a differentiated card in product form. According to Hard AI reports, the "Yuanbao Pai," which began internal testing on January 26, is seen as a key step in Tencent's exploration of new forms of AI social interaction From the leaked internal testing information, "Yuanbao Group" breaks the traditional Chatbot (dialogue robot) "one-on-one" Q&A tool attribute. Users can create or join "groups" and within them, use @Yuanbao or quote conversations to let AI summarize chat content, supervise interest check-ins (such as fitness, reading), and even perform "image remixing" to create meme images and stickers.

More notably, this feature deeply integrates Tencent's social foundation. Users can directly share "group numbers" or invitation links to WeChat Moments and QQ friends, achieving one-click joining. Additionally, according to leaked screenshots, the future public beta version will also integrate Tencent Meeting's audio and video capabilities, launching features like "watch together" and "listen together," allowing users to invite friends to watch movies or matches simultaneously.

This strategy marks Tencent's attempt to transform AI from a cold efficiency tool into a social node that connects people and enhances group interaction. By introducing AI into multi-person social scenarios, Tencent aims to address the common pain point of insufficient user stickiness faced by current AI applications and explore a new space for "people and AI to entertain and collaborate together."

Pony Ma sets the tone for "AI Year," with continuous iteration of the technical foundation

Behind the acceleration of strategy and products is Tencent's ongoing investment in AI technology. Pony Ma stated at the annual meeting that 2025 will be the "AI Year," with fierce industry competition. He emphasized that while steadily advancing in community group buying and food delivery, Tencent's "only significant investment is in AI."

To support this strategy, Tencent's Hunyuan large model is also continuously iterating. On January 26, Tencent released the Hunyuan Image 3.0 image generation version (HunyuanImage 3.0-Instruct) and launched it simultaneously on Yuanbao. This model supports complex image editing and multi-image fusion, allowing users to modify, delete, and change styles (such as comic adaptations), and restore old photos through commands. This upgrade in underlying capabilities directly provides technical support for social features like image remixing in "Yuanbao Group."

In terms of talent, Pony Ma revealed that the Hunyuan team underwent structural adjustments over the past year, focusing on attracting high-level talents, including PhD graduates, and will continue to attract AI-native talents to restructure the team.

In contrast, Pony Ma showed more caution regarding other businesses. He mentioned that Tencent Video was impacted by short dramas last year, with the number of hits falling short of expectations, requiring more patience and a commitment to high-quality long video investments. This tilt in resource allocation further confirms AI's core position in Tencent's future landscape