Yuanbao surpasses Doubao, Goldman Sachs predicted a week ago: "For AI infrastructure, look at Alibaba; for AI applications, look at Tencent."

Tencent Yuanbao has completely gone viral, with download numbers even surpassing ByteDance's Doubao.

Today, Tencent's first AI-native app, Yuanbao, surpassed Doubao, rising to second place in the free app download rankings on Apple's App Store in China. Deepseek continues to hold the top spot.

Just the day before, Tencent's AI assistant "Tencent Yuanbao" launched a new feature for DeepSeek, enabling it to understand image information. Previously, DeepSeek mainly supported scanning text in images; now, after users turn off online search, they can send any image, and Yuanbao can provide analysis and understanding based on the image content. This feature combines the multimodal understanding capabilities of HunYuan.

This milestone event not only marks Tencent's strong momentum in the AI application field but also reaffirms Goldman Sachs' prediction in a report released a week ago: in the AI era, "AI infrastructure looks to Alibaba, AI applications look to Tencent." With the powerful capabilities of the DeepSeek and HunYuan dual models, along with rapid product updates, Tencent Yuanbao is rising quickly.

After high-frequency iterations and updates, Yuanbao achieves a leapfrog advantage

As previously mentioned, at Tencent's annual meeting earlier this year, Ma Huateng revealed that the TEG (Technical Engineering Group), responsible for developing Tencent's HunYuan large model, underwent structural adjustments to focus more on the technical foundation, while productization would be pushed forward by other business groups. In January of this year, Tencent Yuanbao was spun off from TEG to CSIG (Cloud and Smart Industry Group), managed by the Tencent Meeting team, allowing Yuanbao to focus more on market implementation.

Since then, Tencent Yuanbao has welcomed a series of rapid iterations and feature updates:

• On February 13, it integrated the full version of DeepSeek-R1, supporting both HunYuan and DeepSeek models;

• On February 17, the self-developed deep thinking model "HunYuan T1" was launched in grayscale;
• On February 18, Yuanbao urgently called for support for WeChat search, providing users with more entry points and choices;
• On February 19, the deep thinking model "HunYuan T1" was fully launched;
• On February 21, a new feature for DeepSeek was launched, enabling it to understand image information.

After high-frequency iterations and updates, Yuanbao has finally achieved today's results.

According to QuestMobile data, as of last December, Doubao, under ByteDance, had a monthly active user count of 75.23 million, while Tencent Yuanbao only had 2.11 million, ranking eighth. Now, with the model equality brought by DeepSeek, the entire AI industry has been reshuffled, bringing the competition for AIGC products back to the same starting line. With Tencent's super traffic pool, Yuanbao has finally achieved a leapfrog advantage

Goldman Sachs: AI Infrastructure Looks to Alibaba, AI Applications Look to Tencent

On February 14th, Goldman Sachs released a report stating that with the rapid development of AI technology and the continuous expansion of application scenarios, the competitive landscape of China's internet industry is gradually differentiating into two major camps: AI infrastructure and AI applications.

Among them, Alibaba, with its strong cloud service infrastructure, has become a key player in AI infrastructure; while Tencent, with its robust ecosystem and user experience in C-end applications, has become a core beneficiary in the field of AI applications. The report states:

In the internet sector, we are optimistic about Alibaba (expected price-to-earnings ratio of 14 times for fiscal year 2026) as a key player in AI infrastructure, leveraging its scale advantage as China's largest cloud service provider (contributing $19 per ADS in our segment aggregation valuation model). At the same time, we are optimistic about Tencent (expected price-to-earnings ratio of 16 times for fiscal year 2025) as a core beneficiary of AI applications, with its WeChat super app having potential AI agent capabilities and closed-loop transaction abilities, and Tencent Cloud ranking among the top three in China's public cloud market.

We expect that super apps (WeChat, Douyin) will continue to deepen their engagement in transaction areas this year, namely e-commerce and local services. We also believe that as the Chinese model becomes increasingly flexible and the efficiency of computing cost significantly improves, it can drive broader adoption, exploration, and popularization of AI applications, with the potential for global expansion, provided that Chinese companies can continue to acquire computing power.

We anticipate that with the rise of cost-effective and well-functioning open-source models (offered free to developers), the model layer will become more commoditized, which will continue to drive down computing costs (with greater emphasis on the post-training/inference phase) and lead to higher adoption rates of AI, especially in B-end scenarios that may support years of growth in cloud/data center demand.

Goldman Sachs believes that Tencent, through its strong C-end ecosystem and user experience, will deeply integrate AI technology into daily life. The rapid rise of Yuanbao is a testament to Tencent's strong capabilities in the field of AI applications.

The report points out that Yuanbao integrates the powerful inference capabilities of the DeepSeek-R1 model and Tencent Cloud's AI inference infrastructure. This combination not only provides users with a smarter interactive experience but also achieves more precise information delivery and more efficient task execution through the unique content support of the WeChat ecosystem.

Especially after integrating R1, Yuanbao has achieved a qualitative leap in user experience with its powerful inference capabilities and real-time search functions. Users can not only engage in multi-turn conversations through Yuanbao but also quickly access rich content within the ecosystem, such as WeChat official accounts and video accounts, thanks to its deep thinking mode