The experience switched on his lifelong fascination with pattern recognition and machine learning, propelling him to complete a doctorate in computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and eventually to patent the technology for turning photographs into portraits. With his academic peers, Wang – who remains a professor at CUHK – co-founded SenseTime in 2014, turning the start-up into an AI powerhouse valued at US$8 billion according to data provided by Crunchbase.

Wang, who declined to reveal his age, was born in the Hebei provincial capital of Shijiazhuang, near Beijing. He entered the University of Science and Technology in Hefei under a special programme for gifted children, graduating with an engineering degree in 2001. He has three patents on image processing under his name.

Tang, who also goes by Sean, still lectures in signal analysis and image and video processing at CUHK’s Faculty of Engineering. Xu Li, co-founder and chief executive of SenseTime, is another CUHK alumnus, with a doctorate in computer science. Xu and Tang were not available for this interview.

SenseTime brands itself as a technology platform that serves many industries from education to health care, instead of focusing on a single vertical that may quickly saturate, Wang said. The strategy is difficult for other companies to replicate, because many companies focus on narrow areas of development.

“It is difficult to find companies like SenseTime, because its history is so unique ,” said Wang, who is also managing director of SenseTime’s research laboratory. “SenseTime’s model and its biggest investment should be our basic infrastructure, our SenseCore.”

While the company invests in different applications, its two fastest-growing directions are its smart car business and its digital metaverse, or the sum total of all virtual worlds.

“The metaverse will change the way people live and socialise, and smart cars are actually undergoing a very significant change,” he said.

The company, which turns seven in October, now has 5,000 people on staff, 60 per cent of whom are in research and development. There are nearly 300 PhD holders and 36 professors among its employees. They provide the connections with academia that give SenseTime a steady pipeline of talent, said Jeffrey Ding, a Stanford University pre-doctoral fellow and researcher on Chinese AI.

SenseTime’s breakthrough came in 2014, when Tang and his CUHK team developed a facial recognition algorithm called DeepID, that could tell faces apart at an accuracy rate of 99.15 per cent, beating Facebook’s Deepface in a ranking using the Labelled Faces in the Wild (LFW) database designed for the study of facial recognition.

Armed with the accolade of beating the world’s largest social media network two years after Facebook’s US$16 billion stock offer, the CUHK team established a business in Hong Kong. IDG Capital soon came calling as an angel investor, becoming one of the first Series A funders of the start-up.

SenseTime’s algorithms are now used widely in China’s public security and surveillance applications, contributing to about 30 per cent of the company’s revenue according to local media reports. Surveillance is not a business focus, Wang said, declining to elaborate or provide a revenue breakdown.

“Most of China’s AI companies get their major orders from the government and related agencies for security or surveillance contracts, and a significant portion of this still comes from these,” said Zhang Yi, chief executive at Shenzhen-based iiMedia Research.

The doors of America’s academia and research institutions, even MIT where Wang and Tang both obtained their doctorates, slammed shut as soon as SenseTime appeared on the sanctions list. An MIT-SenseTime partnership announced less than 12 months earlier to fund 27 projects like linguistics and biology was put under review, as was MIT’s Intelligence Quest initiative, which sought to “advance research into human and machine intelligence in service to all humanity.”

The snub was “disappointing,” Wang said, but emphasised that SenseTime was “still looking to expand round the globe, with an open stance on every partnership and looking to extend the reach of our technologies abroad.”

“SenseTime aims to use AI to improve people’s lives, and we are complying with rules and laws in all the places where we operate businesses,” he said.

“The indirect, and potentially more consequential, effect of the blacklisting was it raised a lot of questions about the ability for SenseTime to raise funds from international capital,” said Stanford University’s Ding.

Besides geopolitical woes, the four dragons are also facing a saturating surveillance market at home with revenues squeezed by an increasing number of market-hungry competitors. China’s crackdown on Big Tech this year has put additional pressure on data rich AI companies, requiring them to carefully examine their practices under China’s newly introduced Data Security Law and the upcoming Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL).

Like many Chinese AI companies, SenseTime will have to face growing questions about the use of its technology. Since Wang’s entry into the field, the excitement and buzz around AI have been muddled by legal and ethical questions over abuse, the potential to inflame biases and personal privacy.

“We do not have access to customers’ data in general,” Wang said. “If our customers want us to process their data, we will safeguard it and prevent misuse and infringement of privacy. We are the first AI company in China to receive international and domestic information security standard certifications.”

The biggest challenge for AI companies, however, will be finding profitable business models and applications, said iiMedia’s Zhang.

“These companies are in fact driven by capital; the hot money is huge, but so are the losses,” he said.

The way out may be to emphasise SenseTime’s business model of being a technology platform, instead of relying on narrow niches. The company has four major business areas: Smart Business, Smart City, Smart Life and Smart Auto.

“Our investment in the direction of cars will probably need a longer period of five to 10 years,” Wang said.

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“A few years before SenseTime was established, some of our employees could not explain to their parents what it was that they did at work,” Wang said. “Now it’s actually easy. I can turn on my smartphone and say: ‘Your life experiences are brought to you by the things we do.’ They can really feel these changes in [daily] life, all brought to them by AI.”