Chinese AI firm SenseTime launches ChatGPT rival SenseNova, joining giants like Alibaba and Baidu in chatbot race

Firm unveils SenseNova, a set of large AI models that cover key capabilities including computer vision, natural language processing and AI-generated content, during a live demonstration in Shanghai

In China, AI bots will initially develop fast in B2B territory before B2C companies start using them, co-founder and CEO says

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The SenseTime office in Shanghai. The firm’s potential clients include internet firms such as e-commerce operators and video-game developers, co-founder and CEO Xu Li says. Photo: Reuters

Ann Caoin ShanghaiandDaniel Renin Shanghai

Published: 8:40pm, 10 Apr 2023Updated: 5:44pm, 11 Apr 2023

Chinese artificial-intelligence (AI) company SenseTime unveiled its answer to ChatGPT on Monday, jumping onto the generative AI bandwagon as mainland Chinese technology companies race to commercialise the so-called large language model.

The company unveiled SenseNova, its latest set of large AI models that cover key capabilities including computer vision, natural language processing and AI-generated content, during a live demonstration at its data centre in Shanghai’s Lingang free-trade zone.

“In China, AI bots will initially develop fast in B2B [business-to-business] territory before business-to-customer [B2C] companies start using them,” said Xu Li, SenseTime’s co-founder and CEO. “We need to improve our technological capabilities and fine-tune services to better commercialise AI.”

The launch of SenseTime’s AI models follows similar moves by Chinese search-engine giant Baidu and e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding, which owns this newspaper, after ChatGPT – an AI chatbot released to the public by Microsoft-backed OpenAI late last year – prompted Chinese technology companies to come up with their own versions. ChatGPT, which was updated with a latest version called GPT-4 last month, has gained widespread attention because of its ability to hold humanlike conversations.

Among the SenseTime models is SenseChat, which has the ability to understand multiple rounds of conversation and very long texts, an experience similar to ChatGPT. Other applications include a service that can generate images based on text inputs in real time, and a product that can model the moves of humans to animate a digital being in a video.

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