Pony Ma makes a bold statement! Yuanbao splurges 1 billion yuan on Spring Festival red envelopes, AI social "Yuanbao Pai" makes its debut.

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Tencent is trying to replicate the miracle of mobile payments in the increasingly crowded AI sector using its expertise in social strategies.

On January 26, Tencent's Chairman Pony Ma designated 2025 as the “Year of AI” at the company’s annual meeting, and announced that Tencent's AI application “Yuanbao” will launch a Spring Festival event on February 1st, giving away 1 billion yuan in cash. Ma explicitly stated his hope to recreate the spectacular success of the WeChat Red Packet “Shake” event that bound hundreds of millions of users years ago, by offering significant subsidies. This marks Tencent's elevation of AI product user acquisition and engagement to a top group strategic priority.

At the same time, Tencent’s Yuanbao quietly began internal beta testing of a social feature called “Yuanbao Pai”, which Ma revealed was previously a “top secret project.” According to media reports, “Yuanbao Pai” allows users to create groups, within which AI acts not only as an assistant but also actively participates in social interactions. This move signifies Tencent’s attempt to break the current limitation of AI applications being mere efficiency tools, bringing AI into high-frequency social scenarios and building new traffic moats through human-machine symbiotic interaction.

Analysts point out that Tencent’s dual strategy—“heavy subsidies with one hand and social fission with the other”—demonstrates its urgency in commercializing AI. After last year’s industry turbulence, Tencent is trying to leverage its monopoly in the social chain to accelerate the “lightning-speed transformation” of user AI usage habits, in response to fierce competition from ByteDance, Baidu, and other rivals in AI applications.

1 Billion Yuan Cash Injection Aims to Replicate the Payment Battle Miracle

For Tencent, the Spring Festival is often a critical product launch window. At the annual meeting, Ma mentioned Yuanbao’s upcoming Spring Festival event, dividing 1 billion yuan in cash to users, aiming to replicate the successful path of WeChat Pay in 2015. That year, WeChat’s Spring Festival Gala “Shake” event distributed billions of cash red packets, rapidly binding a massive user base to its payment ecosystem and overturning the mobile payment landscape.

According to Tencent’s official announcement, the event will officially launch on February 1st. Users can log in to the Yuanbao App to take part in sharing 1 billion yuan in red packets, with single packet amounts up to 10,000 yuan, plus incentives such as the “10,000-yuan Xiao Ma Card.” The Yuanbao App has updated and opened for reservations—reserved users receive extra lottery chances.

Market commentators believe that after years of not participating in large-scale cash subsidy wars, Tencent’s huge investment in Yuanbao highlights management’s “no room for failure” determination on the AI track. By using high subsidies to lower entry barriers and utilizing the high-traffic Spring Festival, Tencent seeks to rapidly expand Yuanbao’s user base, providing a foundation for subsequent social-focused explorations.

“Top Secret Project” Unveiled: AI Enters the Heart of Social Networking

Besides financial investment, Tencent is also differentiating itself in product form. According to Hard AI’s report, the January 26 beta launch of “Yuanbao Pai” is seen as a key step in Tencent's exploration of the new form of AI socialization.

Based on leaked beta info, “Yuanbao Pai” breaks the traditional Chatbot’s “one-on-one” Q&A tool model. Users can create or join a “Pai” (group), and within it, use @Yuanbao or quote conversations to have AI summarize group chats, supervise interest check-ins (like fitness or reading), and even perform “secondary image creation” such as meme and emoji generation.

More notably, the feature deeply connects to Tencent’s social foundation. Users can directly share Pai numbers or invitation links to their WeChat Moments or QQ friends for instant joining. Additional leaked screenshots suggest that future public beta versions will incorporate Tencent Meeting’s audio/video infrastructure, launching features like “Watch Together” and “Listen Together,” where users can invite friends to watch movies or competitions Synchronically.

This strategy indicates Tencent’s effort to shift AI from a cold efficiency tool to a node connecting people and enhancing group interaction. By bringing AI into multi-person social scenes, Tencent is trying to solve the common challenges of low user engagement in current AI applications and explore entirely new spaces for “AI-human co-entertainment and collaboration.”

Pony Ma Declares the “Year of AI”; Technology Foundation Keeps Iterating

Behind this acceleration in strategy and product is Tencent’s continuous investment in AI technology. At the annual meeting, Ma stated bluntly that 2025 is the “Year of AI” and industry competition is fierce. He stressed that while Tencent continues to consolidate strengths in group-buying and food delivery, “the only thing we’re spending big on is AI.”

To support the strategy, Tencent’s Hunyuan large model continues to iterate. On January 26, Tencent released HunyuanImage 3.0-Instruct, a new version for “image to image” generation, also available in Yuanbao. The model supports complex image editing and multi-image fusion; users can use commands to add/delete/change pictures, modify styles (such as anime-to-reality), and restore old photos. This underlying technology upgrade directly supports features like secondary image creation in Yuanbao Pai’s social gameplay.

In terms of talent, Ma revealed that the Hunyuan team underwent structural adjustments in the past year, focusing on hiring high-level talent including PhD graduates, and will continue to attract “AI native” talent for team restructuring.

In contrast, Ma showed more caution towards other businesses. He mentioned that Tencent Video was impacted by short dramas last year, with fewer blockbuster hits than expected, requiring more patience and continued investment in premium long-form content. This shift in resource allocation further confirms AI’s core status in Tencent’s future roadmap.

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