China’s SenseTime unfurls latest challenger to ChatGPT

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SenseTime Group Inc showed off a suite of new artificial-intelligence (AI) services developed with the company’s access to vast troves of data and deep computing power, including the latest Chinese challenger to AI phenom ChatGPT.
Chief Executive Officer Xu Li took the stage to demonstrate the large AI model SenseNova and a user-facing chatbot called SenseChat. Xu, with help from staff, introduced how SenseChat could tell a story about a cat catching fish, with multiple rounds of questions and responses. Then he demonstrated how the bot could help with writing computer code, taking in layman-level questions in English or Chinese and translating them into a workable product.
“With SenseNova, we can provide a supermarket of AI big models” for clients, Xu said. “We welcome our partners to connect to the big model and upgrade it with us.”
Xu said that now human programmers do about 80% of the work in AI development, but in the future it will be reversed so that AI can handle 80% of the effort while humans take on 20% of the work to direct and polish. The AI model can also help double-check, translate and revise code, he said.
Xu also unveiled an image processing tool called Miaohua, or “draw in seconds.” A fourth demo about a product called Ruying, or “like a shadow,” can model the moves of a human to animate a digital being in a video. It also unveiled a service for modeling structures that use AI rendering to generate 3D buildings. Shanghai-based SenseTime, best known as a leader in computer vision, is joining a global race to develop generative AI since OpenAI’s ChatGPT captured the popular imagination.
Microsoft Corp pledged a $10 billion investment towards the US startup, while rivals from Google to Baidu Inc unveiled AI services that can similarly create original content from poetry to art just with simple user prompts.
SenseTime, which telegraphed the event by disclosing progress in training text-to-image large generative models, is also backed by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Like every other major tech firm, the Chinese online commerce leader founded by Jack Ma is working on integrating generative AI across its various services, and began inviting corporate cloud customers to test drive the service last week.
There are concerns however over whether Chinese companies can secure reliable access to the high-end chips and technology needed to develop large-scale AI models over the longer term.
SenseTime itself is operating under US sanctions that inhibit its access to capital as well as crucial American components, and the Biden administration imposed restrictions on the sale of AI accelerator chips to Chinese customers — a critical component in the development of any large-scale generative model.
SenseTime, co-founded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology alum Tang Xiao’ou, was one of the most highly anticipated debuts of 2021. At the time of its IPO, SenseTime claimed in its prospectus to be the largest AI software firm in Asia with an 11% overall market share.
Beijing plans to introduce rules to govern the use of artificial intelligence across a swath of industries.