❯ Tencent releases Hy Image 3.5 Preview, self-rated on par with ByteDance’s Seedream 5.0 Pro

launch and priceTencent released Hy Image 3.5 Preview on September 22, priced at $0.024 per image and being folded into Yuanbao, film-editing and design tools. The company says testing with hundreds of in-house designers put it on par with ByteDance’s Seedream 5.0 Pro and slightly ahead of Google’s Nano Banana Pro and Alibaba’s Qwen-Image-3.0 Pro.

read the sourcingPer Bloomberg, these comparisons come entirely from internal testing; Tencent published no external benchmark numbers and no third party has replicated them. That mirrors Tencent’s Hy4 preview launch, where it self-rated slightly ahead of GLM-5.3 on an evaluation it designed and ran. Tencent’s Hong Kong shares rose more than 7% on the day, which coincided with Alibaba’s Apsara Conference.

the image-model fieldByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent and Google have converged into the same band on image generation, with gaps that take in-house designer ratings to tell apart. Content teams buying image generation should therefore look at unit price and integration cost: at $0.024 an image, embedded directly into Yuanbao and editing tools, Tencent is competing on distribution rather than image quality.

▪ SIGNALWhen quality gaps take internal ratings to detect, image models are competing on which one gets embedded in more workflows.