Produced by | He Xi

Typeset by | Ye Yuan

As the new year unfolds, Tencent has been making significant strides in the AI social sector.

On January 25th, Tencent unveiled plans to distribute a staggering 1 billion yuan in cash red envelopes via its Yuanbao app on February 1st, encouraging users to share these digital treats on social platforms for additional rewards.

The very next day (January 26th), Tencent's AI assistant, Yuanbao, rolled out an internal test for a novel social feature dubbed 'Yuanbao Pai.' This innovative tool allows users to create or join group 'Pais,' transforming AI from a mere passive tool into an active social participant. It can summarize chat content, serve as a 'supervisor' for fitness or reading goals, and engage in secondary image creation. Future updates promise synchronous entertainment features like 'watch together' and 'listen together,' leveraging Tencent Meeting's robust audio and video capabilities.

At first glance, Tencent's 1 billion yuan investment in AI social red envelopes seems substantial. However, when juxtaposed against the backdrop of a fierce AI arms race among domestic internet giants, a pertinent question arises: amid competitors wagering hundreds of billions on the future, does Tencent's much-anticipated 1 billion-yuan red envelope campaign appear somewhat 'stingy' and overly cautious?

01

The 'Hundreds of Billions' AI Investments by ByteDance and Alibaba: A Benchmark

To comprehend why Tencent's 1 billion-yuan red envelope campaign may seem 'stingy,' it's crucial to contextualize it within the current investment landscape among China's leading AI contenders.

From 2025 to 2026, the AI competition among Chinese internet companies has transitioned from a singular focus on model capabilities to a multi-faceted battle encompassing computing power, user acquisition, ecosystem development, and brand mindshare. ByteDance and Alibaba have exemplified what it means to 'bet big' in this arena.

Let's begin with ByteDance, which has adopted an aggressively bold approach. Reports indicate that ByteDance plans to invest a staggering 160 billion yuan in AI in 2026, up from 150 billion yuan in 2025. Nearly half of this colossal sum is earmarked for purchasing advanced chips essential for AI model development. This investment represents a quarter of ByteDance's 2025 net profit, signaling not just a strategic move but a declaration of intent: to solidify AI's foundation at the expense of short-term profits.

Meanwhile, ByteDance's AI application, Doubao, has surpassed 100 million daily active users and is now exporting its capabilities to enterprises at competitive prices through Volcano Engine, forming a closed loop from consumer-grade to enterprise-grade services. This 'short-term profit sacrifice, all-in commitment, and ecosystem binding' strategy aims to leverage capital and traffic to swiftly establish market dominance.

Alibaba is also making significant strides. Media reports reveal that in the fiscal quarter ending in the second quarter of 2025 alone, Alibaba's cumulative investment in AI infrastructure and product development exceeded 100 billion yuan. Earlier, Alibaba announced plans to invest 380 billion yuan over the next three years to build cloud and AI hardware infrastructure. Alibaba's investments extend beyond chip procurement; they focus on creating a fully autonomous AI ecosystem—from underlying computing power and intermediate-layer models to upper-layer scenario applications—intending to translate technological advantages into growth engines for its cloud computing business and comprehensive market penetration across B-end and C-end markets.

Some may argue that Tencent's AI investment scale is not insignificant. Indeed, public reports indicate that Tencent's total AI computing power investment in 2025 was nearly 110 billion yuan, primarily directed towards intelligent computing, GPU procurement, and computing power leasing.

However, the issue lies in Tencent's 'seamless ecosystem integration' strategy, which has failed to yield impressive results in key markets, particularly the C-end. Take Tencent's promoted Yuanbao as an example: as of October 2025, its daily active users numbered only around 5.6 million, significantly trailing behind leading products like Doubao and Tongyi Qianwen.

To put it bluntly, despite Yuanbao's reliance on the massive traffic from WeChat and QQ, Tencent has yet to deliver satisfactory results in this new war defined by computing power and ecosystems. In this context, investing 1 billion yuan in red envelopes to capture the market appears somewhat 'stingy' and overly cautious.

02

Can Tencent's 1 Billion Investment Replicate Its 'WeChat Red Envelope Moment'?

Another reason for questioning Tencent's 1 billion-yuan red envelope investment is its lack of a significant advantage in the upcoming Spring Festival marketing battle. Tencent is likely to find it challenging to replicate its 'WeChat Red Envelope Moment' with this investment.

Why?

In 2015, during the Spring Festival, WeChat's 'Shake Shake' red envelopes forcefully disrupted the mobile payment market, binding billions of users' bank cards overnight. However, today's market environment has undergone profound changes, posing severe challenges to this 'replication' effort.

Firstly, the competitive landscape has evolved.

Back then, WeChat red envelopes executed a 'dimensionality reduction strike' using social relationship chains in the nascent mobile payment market. Today, the AI social track features 'omnidirectional warfare' from competitors: ByteDance sponsored the 2026 CCTV Spring Festival Gala, attempting to implant Doubao into a national memory scene; Baidu simultaneously launched a 500 million-yuan red envelope campaign and secured a partnership with Beijing TV's Spring Festival Gala, employing a combined branding and traffic strategy. These moves aim to occupy the commanding heights of 'brand mindshare,' while Tencent's 1 billion-yuan red envelope campaign currently appears more as an internal app 'operational activity,' lagging in brand momentum.

Secondly, user demands have evolved.

The core of mobile payment was 'convenience,' where social relationship chains could deliver a decisive blow. However, the core of AI social is 'usefulness' and 'ease of use.' Users may be attracted by red envelopes, but if Yuanbao Pai only offers light entertainment and basic AI interactions, failing to address practical pain points in work, study, or deep creativity, then 'taking the money and leaving' will likely be the norm. Red envelopes can buy the first click but not long-term retention and loyalty.

Thirdly, ecosystem synergy faces challenges.

While Yuanbao Pai can be instantly shared to WeChat and QQ, leveraging existing relationship chains, the flip side of this double-edged sword is that it may merely become a 'feature plugin' within the WeChat ecosystem rather than an independently valuable AI-native social platform. If its experience fails to transcend the enhanced traditional group chat framework, why would users open an additional app? Tencent needs to prove Yuanbao Pai's irreplaceability, not just its convenience.

In short, the market has fundamentally changed, and Tencent will find it truly difficult to replicate its 'WeChat Red Envelope Moment' with just 1 billion yuan in cash red envelopes.

03

To Capture AI Social, Tencent Can't Afford to Be 'Conservative'

Tencent's 1 billion yuan investment in red envelopes for AI social is timely, and its strategy follows a familiar path. However, in a rapidly evolving sector, relying solely on old maps to find new continents may result in missing opportunities to define the future.

In the AI era, the essence of social interaction is undergoing a profound transformation. Traditionally, social interaction centered on connecting people; however, AI's evolution has transformed it from a mere tool into an interactive, even empathetic 'social entity.' This means the social field has expanded:

AI can serve as an efficient catalyst between people (e.g., automatically summarizing chat points, supervising shared goals); AI itself can become a companion, creative partner, or entertainment object; more notably, social networks are evolving from purely interpersonal networks into a fused space of 'interpersonal networks + intelligent agent networks.'

In this new fused space, whoever defines the interaction rules may seize the initiative in the next generation of social interaction.

However, the window to define these rules is closing. Before Tencent's internal test of Yuanbao Pai, Baidu's Wenxin App had already launched an internal test of 'multi-person, multi-intelligent agent group chats.' Unlike Yuanbao Pai's focus on entertainment and atmosphere, Baidu's feature is more task- and collaboration-oriented: it allows multiple AI roles with professional capabilities to be invoked within a group, with these AIs actively intervening based on context to address the practical pain points of traditional group chats, such as information overload and inefficient collaboration—directly pulling the AI social battlefield into the depth of productivity enhancement. Meanwhile, Alibaba's apps have also started integrating relevant AI group chat features.

It is foreseeable that other mainstream AI assistants like ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba's Qianwen will soon add social features.

In contrast, the current form of Yuanbao Pai resembles a 'fun plugin' designed to enhance AI assistant stickiness. Its creativity is commendable, increasing fun through red envelopes and atmosphere creation, which is very 'Tencent.' However, the issue lies in that, during the paradigm definition period of AI social, focusing solely on 'fun' and 'atmosphere' appears somewhat shallow.

Baidu demonstrates a more disruptive possibility: future group chats may consist of collaborative teams formed by humans and multiple professional AI agents. This touches on the fundamental question of how to reconstruct organizational and collaborative methods using AI.

This serves as a clear warning to Tencent. If its investment and exploration remain conservative, content with buying traffic through red envelopes and maintaining stickiness with light features, it may miss the critical window to define interaction rules early on.

The AI social competition is essentially an imagination contest about how humans will coexist with intelligence in the future. It requires not just the 'cleverness' of traffic tactics but the 'boldness' to define paradigms and reshape rules. Red envelopes can buy a lively Spring Festival but not the next decade.

Tencent's 1 billion-yuan red envelope is a probing stone thrown into the AI social wave. It has created ripples and measured the depth and pressure of the waters; it proves Tencent's determination to enter the field but also reflects its caution when faced with fundamental innovation.

To truly capture AI social, Tencent may need to be bolder: step out of the mindset of viewing AI as a tool to 'enhance traditional social interaction' and think more deeply about the fundamental changes brought by intelligent agents as new social nodes; invest resources in more foundational and forward-looking interaction mode experiments rather than merely stacking features; and even demonstrate greater courage to challenge and reconstruct the inherent social logic within its product ecosystem.

Time is of the essence. It's time for Tencent to let go and truly 'dive into' this battle for the future.