SenseTime pauses trading as stock surges 30% with new AI model’s launch

SenseTime CEO and board chairman Xu Li / Photo Credit: SenseTime

Chinese AI giant SenseTime briefly paused its stock trading after its share price quickly rose by as much as 36% in Hong Kong today, Bloomberg reported.

The surge followed the launch of the fifth and latest version of SenseNova, the company’s large language model (LLM), at the company’s Tech Day event in Shanghai. According to SenseTime CEO Xu Li, this version is comparable to or even better than Open AI’s ChatGPT-4.

Li said that SenseNova 5.0 matches or exceeds GPT-4 Turbo in its knowledge, reasoning, mathematical skills, and coding capacity. The LLM can now support the education and content industries, and aid in finance and data analysis, he added.

The SenseNova Edge-side LLM, the latest iteration of the enterprise version of SenseNova, was also introduced during the event.

Since its founding in 2014, SenseTime has earned recognition for its facial recognition tech, a major part of China’s surveillance system. It has since invested heavily in developing its AI capabilities.

These investments were made despite China’s regulatory clampdown on the industry. In August 2023, the Chinese government mandated AI service developers to register their platforms with regulators and agree to security reviews.

Despite greater government scrutiny, the country’s tech giants have continued to develop LLMs that can compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Just last week, Baidu said that Ernie Bot, its LLM service, had reached 200 million users 13 months after its launch.

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