On February 18, the science popularization blogger "Three Dads Laboratory" revealed on social media that Tencent's Yuanbao, after integrating the DeepSeek AI system, appeared to have commercial advertisements embedded in its responses. Screenshots show that when users asked for "moving air conditioner" advice to avoid pitfalls, Yuanbao recommended third-party service platforms like "58 Daojia" and "Quick Recycling".
In response to the doubts raised by netizen @Zhang Jun, the public relations director of Tencent, Zhang stated: "Theoretically, there shouldn't be any advertisements. We have asked the technical team to investigate. He speculated that this phenomenon might be due to Yuanbao referencing content from the '58 Daojia' official account's pitfall avoidance guide when it activated its online search function. Zhang suggested that users could verify whether the responses are of an advertising nature by asking follow-up questions.
It is noteworthy that the WeChat search function has also undergone service adjustments. Some users found a prompt at the top of the WeChat chat window saying "Download Yuanbao (Experience DeepSeek R1)".
In this regard, WeChat stated that a limited test of the search function has been conducted to integrate DeepSeek to enrich the search experience, and user enthusiasm has far exceeded expectations. Currently, resources are tight, and to allow everyone to experience DeepSeek more quickly and stably, Tencent is urgently coordinating internal resources to deploy Yuanbao to support and facilitate more users in experiencing the full version of DeepSeek-R1 and the latest Mixed Deep Thinking Model T1 (Thinker).
Currently, both new features are still in a limited gray testing phase, and WeChat recommends that users experience the related services based on actual interface prompts. This incident reflects that the AI large model still needs improvement in the mechanisms for referencing third-party content and the boundaries of commercialization, and it also exposes the service capacity pressures Tencent faces in advancing the implementation of AI technology.
