Chinese facial recognition pioneer SenseTime pivots to GenAI in business revamp

The company hopes to ‘better address the opportunities as well as challenges brought about by the AI 2.0 era’

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SenseTime is officially pivoting to generative AI. Photo: Reuters

Published: 3:30pm, 4 Dec 2024

SenseTime, one of China’s leading pioneers in facial recognition, has unveiled a sweeping restructuring plan to centre its business around generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), seen as key for the company to stay relevant in a rapidly developing field.

The Hong Kong-listed firm is adopting a “1 plus X” structure, whereby “1” represents the company’s core operation of building AI models and cloud technology, while “X” refers to industry solutions for the car, healthcare, robotics and retail sectors, SenseTime said in a filing with the city’s stock exchange on Wednesday.

The revamp “is a repositioning of the company’s strategic direction and core business areas to better address the opportunities as well as challenges brought about by the AI 2.0 era”, the company said.

GenAI consists of algorithms that can be used to create content, such as text and video, in response to short prompts.

A chess-playing robot developed by SenseTime. Photo: Matt Haldane

Since US start-up OpenAI launched ChatGPT late in 2022, GenAI has quickly replaced computer vision as the focus of the AI industry. In China, Big Tech companies from Baidu to Tencent Holdings, along with a new breed of GenAI start-ups, have been investing heavily in large language models (LLMs), stealing the spotlight from an earlier generation of AI stars that included SenseTime, CloudWalk and DeepGlint.