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Introducing Hy4 Preview

Introducing Hy4 Preview

AI Simon Willison
Tencent released Hy4, a massive 770B parameter open-weight model with a 1M token context window and selectable reasoning modes.
What: Hy4 is a text-only model that operates with two reasoning settings: 'high' (default) and 'no_think', allowing users to toggle whether the model generates hidden reasoning traces.
Why it matters: The inclusion of 'no_think' flags reflects a growing industry effort to provide users more control over model latency and verbosity, especially for tasks that do not benefit from deep chain-of-thought processing.
Decoder
  • Open-weight: Models for which the weights are publicly available, though the training data or exact training recipe may not be.
  • Reasoning trace: Hidden tokens generated by a model during a 'thinking' phase before the final response, often used to improve complex problem solving.
Original article

Introducing Hy4 Preview. New open weight text input (no vision) LLM from Chinese company Tencent today: 770B total parameters, 49B active parameters, 1M token context window, 1.56TB on Hugging Face.

This is a big size increase from their previous Hy3 in July, which was 295B, 21B active, 256,000 context, 598GB.

I recently started using model chat templates to better understand their capabilities. Here's Hy4's chat_template.jinja on Hugging Face, which includes this section:

{%- if not reasoning_effort is defined %}
    {%- set reasoning_effort = 'high' %}
{%- elif reasoning_effort not in ['high', 'no_think'] %}
    {%- if reasoning_effort is none %}
        {{- raise_exception('reasoning_effort error : None, should be no_think/high') }}
    {%- else %}
        {{- raise_exception('reasoning_effort error : ' + reasoning_effort + ', should be no_think/high') }}
    {%- endif %}
{%- endif %}

So it looks like there are just two reasoning effort levels: "high" (the default) and "no_think" (reason by disabled).

I tried my "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" prompt with the default high reasoning via OpenRouter and got this:

[...] Let's maybe add a helmet? It could improve riding theme, but may obscure head. Maybe a small cycling cap or helmet? The user didn't ask; can add red helmet? Might be cute. But pelican with big beak; a helmet might obscure. Better maybe no.

Maybe add sunglasses? no.

Maybe add water? no.

It's interesting how the reasoning trace uses slightly truncated English, presumably because perfect grammar isn't useful or token efficient for hidden reasoning text.

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