Tencent released its 2026 Q2 earnings report on August 12 and held its routine earnings call at 8 p.m. local time. During the call, Pony mentioned that WorkBuddy recently ranked first among AI productivity services in China in terms of monthly interaction volume, changing the previous metric of daily active users. James Mitchell stated that after confirming WorkBuddy is breaking out, Tencent decisively tilted resources to it and lowered the priority of some other new AI products. The management noted that the primary use of current capital expenditure is to train larger and better Hunyuan models in the coming months, with the important secondary use being to provide inference computing power for the Hunyuan, DeepSeek and other models behind WorkBuddy. Sales and marketing expenses in this quarter reached 11.9 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 26%, mainly used for the promotion of games and AI-native products. The article suggests WorkBuddy accounts for a large share of this expense, noting advertisements appeared in Focus Media elevators and on CCTV. The reason for heavy promotion also relates to Yao Shunyus core work at OpenAI being reinforcement learning, which is key to post-training.