Head to head · LLM inference · October 2026 research run

Tencent Hy4 vs Muse Spark Open

Tencent Hy4 scores 64 (B) on agent readiness against Muse Spark Open's 56.5 (C), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Muse Spark Open leads on payments & pricing. Both do llm inference.

Best model APIs and inference for AI agents · All 1044 models comparisons

Which one, for what

Tencent Hy4 B

Best for Long-context agent work, coding and office or finance tasks on a 1M-token context with images, for teams already on Tencent Cloud or happy to verify an account there.

Ahead on

  • Schema & documentation, 73 against 61
  • Agent ergonomics, 86 against 69
  • Security & auth, 71 against 44
  • Maintenance & community, 73 against 60

Watch for

Weights, licence and system card are promised but not published; tencent/Hy4 didn't answer on Hugging Face on 11 November

Muse Spark Open C

Best for A team with a four-GPU Blackwell node, or two to four Mac Studios, that wants a 1M-token multimodal coding and agent model on its own hardware with no prompts leaving it.

Ahead on

  • Payments & pricing, 75 against 45

Also in its favour

  • No key needed to call it

Watch for

The NVFP4 checkpoint (about 537 GB) serves on four B300 GPUs and the BF16 one (about 1.65 TB) on eight

Why the edge

Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.

Payments & pricing Muse Spark Open +30

Tencent Hy4 45

Model reading for hy4 on Tencent Cloud TokenHub. Platform facts are the tencent-tokenhub listing's (checked 1 November), carried over as RULES.md allows for a model on an already graded platform. No machine payment protocol (0). The price page, updated 9 November, lists ¥6 input, ¥0.3 cached and ¥18 output per million tokens, with Hy4 billed at 50% until 31 December 2026 (20). TokenHub's campaign of 1M free tokens per language model, read on 1 November, isn't confirmed for hy4 on the price page, so half (10 of 20, a judgement call). A person signs up with real-name verification (0). 0 + 20 + 10 + 0 = 30. Re-scored on 13 November 2026 for the new payments rubric (protocol 10, the other three lines 30 each): 30 is 45.

Muse Spark Open 75

Self-hosted rule. Nothing to buy from Meta, and the licence grants use free of charge. The Model as a Service clause asks for a separate agreement only from licensee groups above $20M gross revenue in 12 months (20). Free to run with no card (20). Meta's own weights need a manually reviewed Hugging Face form with legal name and date of birth, or, since the 4 November re-read of Get the model, a signed-in download from Meta's own page, so an agent can't get them alone. The ungated GGUF quantisations from ggml-org and Unsloth that Meta's docs point to download without approval (the Unsloth repository is ungated on 4 November), so part of the line (10 of 20). No payment protocol (0). Hosted copies at $1.25 input and $4.25 output per million tokens need each provider's own account and are not graded. 20 + 20 + 10 + 0 = 50. Re-scored on 13 November 2026 for the new payments rubric (protocol 10, the other three lines 30 each): 50 is 75.

Security & auth Tencent Hy4 +27

Tencent Hy4 71

Model reading for hy4 on Tencent Cloud TokenHub. Platform facts are the tencent-tokenhub listing's (checked 1 November), carried over as RULES.md allows for a model on an already graded platform. Bearer keys limited by model, service, IP range and token quota, long-lived with no rotation (26 of 30). The terms say inputs aren't used to train Tencent Cloud's own models, and Hy4 is first party, so no third party's terms apply (14 of 20). Retention only as long as the service needs, no periods (7 of 15). Per-call audit logs and optional full logs to the customer's CLS (14 of 15). No security.txt; Tencent's TSRC bounty covers Tencent Cloud; no certification checked (10 of 20). 26 + 14 + 7 + 14 + 10 = 71.

Muse Spark Open 44

Read as software the owner runs. No account or key to run it. Meta's weights need manual approval on Hugging Face and an access token, and server authentication is the owner's to add (12 of 30). An agent model that calls whatever tools the operator gives it. The card recommends human-in-the-loop confirmation for irreversible actions and Meta reports agentic-risk evaluations, but nothing in the model or template enforces an approval (8 of 20). The chat template neutralises special-token sequences and media placeholders in caller text and wraps tool results in <tool_output>, and the card advises protecting internal assistant messages and layering defences against adversarial input. No indirect prompt-injection results are published (10 of 15). No call log of its own. Visibility depends on the serving stack (5 of 15). Weights are safetensors that load through Transformers' own classes from 5.19, and Meta published cyber, chemical, biological and misalignment evaluations. dev.meta.ai/.well-known/security.txt answers 404 (re-read on 4 November), research.meta.ai per the 15 October check, and no security route is on the card or in the docs, only museoss@meta.com and the Hugging Face discussions (9 of 20). 12 + 8 + 10 + 5 + 9 = 44.

Agent ergonomics Tencent Hy4 +17

Tencent Hy4 86

Model reading for hy4 on Tencent Cloud TokenHub. Platform facts are the tencent-tokenhub listing's (checked 1 November), carried over as RULES.md allows for a model on an already graded platform. Function calling is marked for hy4 in the model list (18 of 20). Structured output marked (13 of 15). Cache-hit price published, ¥0.3 against ¥6 input (14 of 15). 1M-token context with 960K input and 64K output (15). Batch at half price covered Hy3 and Hy4 preview on 1 November; whether it covers hy4 wasn't re-read (3 of 10). OpenAI and Anthropic SDKs with a changed base URL, plus Tencent Cloud's SDK and CLI for the control plane (8 of 10). Errors with code, messages, upstream status and request ID (15 of 15). 18 + 13 + 14 + 15 + 3 + 8 + 15 = 86.

Muse Spark Open 69

Model reading of the checklist (tool use, structured output, caching, context, throughput, defaults and SDKs, errors). OpenAI-format tools and parallel calls come back as tool_calls, and the template supports namespaced tools and deferred loading through a tool_search tool. A forced tool_choice is not documented (17 of 20). JSON mode and JSON Schema come from each runtime's guided decoding, which Meta's docs show for TensorRT-LLM only (8 of 15). Prefix caching is the runtime's. Meta's SGLang command turns on hierarchical caching, and Dynamo routes each request to the worker holding its cached context (8 of 10). 1,048,576-token context, with sliding-window attention on 46 of 62 layers holding KV memory down (15 of 15). Draft models for speculative decoding in SGLang and vLLM, and no batch mode of its own (7 of 10). Any OpenAI SDK works against a local server, but reasoning can't be turned off, defaults to the most expensive level, and needs streaming, a max_tokens budget for reasoning and the right stop tokens (6 of 15). The template raises named errors for an unsupported reasoning effort, tool arguments passed as a string and a tool message with no name. Server errors are the runtime's (8 of 15). 17 + 8 + 8 + 15 + 7 + 6 + 8 = 69.

Maintenance & community Tencent Hy4 +13

Tencent Hy4 73

Model reading for hy4 on Tencent Cloud TokenHub. Platform facts are the tencent-tokenhub listing's (checked 1 November), carried over as RULES.md allows for a model on an already graded platform. Added on 4 November 2026 per the release notes; the model list and price page were updated on 9 November (30). Retirement notices of 21 to 33 days, no minimum written (7 of 12). Heavy retirement churn on the platform (3 of 8). Dated release notes and announcements, round-the-clock support (13 of 15). CLI replies not sampled (3 of 10). Control-plane SDKs and CLI, no inference SDK of its own (12 of 15). CLI runtime stated, CI not checked (5 of 10). 30 + 7 + 3 + 13 + 3 + 12 + 5 = 73. The model is a week old, so these lines are TokenHub's habits more than Hy4's record.

Muse Spark Open 60

Read for an open-weight model released three weeks ago. Released on 15 October 2026 (30). One release, BF16 and NVFP4 on the same day, with no history of revisions, successors or notice periods, and Meta Model API has no deprecation policy either (6 of 20). None of the 29 replies counted by script on 4 November across the BF16 repository's discussions came from Meta. Feedback goes to the discussions or museoss@meta.com, and Meta's docs and developer blog carry dated posts (8 of 25). Day-one support in vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM, Transformers, llama.cpp, MLX and Unsloth with Meta's own recipes, though SGLang's is a dev image and TensorRT-LLM's a feature branch (12 of 15). Current dependencies (Transformers 5.19), but no CI visible to us (4 of 10). 30 + 6 + 8 + 12 + 4 = 60.

Schema & documentation Tencent Hy4 +12

Tencent Hy4 73

Model reading for hy4 on Tencent Cloud TokenHub. Platform facts are the tencent-tokenhub listing's (checked 1 November), carried over as RULES.md allows for a model on an already graded platform. No OpenAPI file for inference; field pages for the OpenAI and Anthropic formats as TokenHub implements them (12 of 25). llms.txt with Markdown copies (10). The model list, updated 9 November, gives hy4's context, input and output limits and marks thinking, structured output, function calling, caching and image understanding; computer use, which Tencent's release names, isn't marked (13 of 20). Typed field pages (10 of 15). Examples in five languages and an error page of 30 codes (14 of 15). Dated release notes, with hy4 added on 4 November (14 of 15). 12 + 10 + 13 + 10 + 14 + 14 = 73.

Muse Spark Open 61

Read for a model the owner serves. No specification of its own. The contract is the Jinja chat template, which renders OpenAI-format tools with additionalProperties: false added and rejects bad values, plus the OpenAI-compatible servers in vLLM and SGLang with the muse parsers (10 of 25). dev.meta.ai/llms.txt lists the Muse Spark Open overview and seven pages under it, plus three cookbook pages, each with a Markdown copy (10). The card lists seven intended uses and six limitations, the docs say when to pick BF16 or NVFP4 and which reasoning strength suits which task, and the Usage Policy states what is out of scope (17 of 20). reasoning_effort is an enum of four values and anything else returns an error, and tools take JSON Schema. Structured output is documented only for TensorRT-LLM's response_format, not in the prompting guide or for vLLM and SGLang (11 of 15). curl and Python examples for every runtime and hosted provider, the rendered prompt for each case, and the template's own error messages, but no error reference for a served model (11 of 15). One release, with no changelog or version scheme beyond the licence's version line, Muse Spark Open (2 of 15). 10 + 10 + 17 + 11 + 11 + 2 = 61.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runTencent Hy4Muse Spark OpenEdge
Reliability16%204642Tencent Hy4 +4
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.27361Tencent Hy4 +12
Agent ergonomics13%16.28669Tencent Hy4 +17
Security & auth14%17.57144Tencent Hy4 +27
Payments & pricing10%12.54575Muse Spark Open +30
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.87360Tencent Hy4 +13
Transparency & trust7%8.85253Muse Spark Open +1
Negative events≤1500
TotalB 64/100C 56.5/100

Facts side by side

FactTencent Hy4Muse Spark Open
KindModel APIModel API
VendorTencent (Hy team)Meta
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
TransportsHTTPHTTP
AuthAPI keyNone
PricingPay per useFree
x402nono
LicenceHosted model under the Tencent Cloud TokenHub terms. Tencent says weights and a system card will follow; no licence is stated yetMuse Model Licence (source-available weights, not an OSI licence), free of charge with an attribution notice, a separate agreement with Meta before Model as a Service by a licensee group above $20M gross revenue, and the Muse Spark Open Usage Policy
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-11-042026-10-15
Terms last updatedcouldn't be read2026-10-15
Privacy policy last updatedcouldn't be readno document linked
Customer content may train modelscouldn't be readnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accesscouldn't be readnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingcouldn't be readnot found in the text
Terms or service can change without noticecouldn't be readnot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waivercouldn't be readnot found in the text

How the scores have moved

Verdicts

Tencent Hy4

Tencent's flagship model is on TokenHub as hy4, with a 1M-token context, image understanding, function calling and caching, at ¥6 input and ¥18 output per million tokens, half price until the end of 2026. The weights it is called open source for aren't published yet, and every benchmark is Tencent's own.

Muse Spark Open

Muse Spark Open runs on the owner's hardware in seven runtimes, with OpenAI-compatible servers in vLLM and SGLang, standard tool calls, a 1M-token context and Meta's own serving docs. Serving the 537 GB NVFP4 checkpoint takes four B300 GPUs, Meta's download is gated by manual review, and the licence adds attribution and a revenue threshold for model resellers.

Before you call either

Tencent Hy4

  1. Use model id hy4 on TokenHub's OpenAI- or Anthropic-compatible endpoints; hy4-preview is a separate, older model
  2. Keep input under 960K tokens and expect at most 64K output
  3. Reuse prompt prefixes: cached input is ¥0.3 against ¥6
  4. Check the price page for the end of the 50% discount on 31 December 2026 before budgeting
  5. Read rate limits from the console or DescribeModelQuota; the public docs don't give them for chat models

Muse Spark Open

  1. Start vLLM or SGLang with --reasoning-parser muse --tool-call-parser muse (vLLM also --enable-auto-tool-choice), or tool calls come back as raw text
  2. Set reasoning_effort to low or medium for short tasks. The default is xhigh, reasoning can't be turned off, and other values return an error
  3. Stop only on <|eot|> and end of text. Stopping on <|eom|> cuts off tool calls and final answers
  4. Stream long generations and leave max_tokens room for reasoning, or content can come back empty with finish_reason length
  5. Don't call Meta Model API for this model. Use a self-hosted server or a hosted provider's model string, such as meta-models/muse-spark-open

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Tencent Hy4 or Muse Spark Open?

Tencent Hy4 scores 64 (B) on agent readiness against Muse Spark Open's 56.5 (C), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Muse Spark Open leads on payments & pricing.

Do Tencent Hy4 and Muse Spark Open need an API key?

Tencent Hy4 needs an API key. Muse Spark Open needs no key.

Can an agent call Tencent Hy4 and Muse Spark Open without installing anything?

No hosted endpoint is listed for Tencent Hy4. No hosted endpoint is listed for Muse Spark Open.

Other comparisons with Tencent Hy4 or Muse Spark Open

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