Hunyuan-MT 1.5: How a Tiny 1.8B Model Beats Commercial Translation APIs

Hunyuan-MT 1.5: How a 1.8B Model Delivers Champion-Level Translation In the world of machine translation, a persistent dilemma exists: should we chase the highest possible translation quality, or prioritize deployment efficiency and inference speed? Traditionally, larger models with more parameters promised better results, but at the cost of significant computational expense and high deployment barriers. Tencent Hunyuan’s newly open-sourced HY-MT1.5 series directly tackles this challenge. It consists of two members: a nimble 1.8B “lightweight contender” and a powerful 7B “champion heavyweight.” Remarkably, the 1.8B model—with less than one-third the parameters of its larger sibling—achieves translation quality that is “close” to …