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SenseTime co-founder, chairman and chief executive Xu Li introduces the latest advances of the SenseNova 5.0 large language model at the firm’s Tech Day event in Shanghai on Tuesday. Photo: Handout

Chinese AI giant SenseTime suspends trading as shares surge more than 30% after launch of updated large language model

  • Trading in Hong Kong was halted on Wednesday pending ‘the release of an announcement which may constitute inside information of the company’
  • SenseTime’s shares gained as much as 36 per cent after the company launched the latest iteration of its SenseNova large language model
SenseTime
Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) giant SenseTime Group halted trading of its stock in Hong Kong after its share price surged more than 30 per cent on Wednesday morning, following the launch of its updated SenseNova large language model (LLM) that the firm claims to be on par with OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo model.
SenseTime, which has its global headquarters at the Hong Kong Science Park, suspended trading at 11:15am on Wednesday – pending “the release of an announcement which may constitute inside information of the company” – after its shares gained as much as 36 per cent before closing up 31.2 per cent to HK$0.8.
That hefty gain came after SenseTime co-founder, chairman and chief executive Xu Li on Tuesday introduced the latest advances of the company’s updated LLM – the technology used to train generative AI services like ChatGPT – at the firm’s Tech Day event in Shanghai.

“In our pursuit to push the boundaries of SenseNova’s capabilities, SenseTime remains guided by the Scaling Law as we build upon our large [language] model based on this three-tier architecture: knowledge, reasoning and execution,” said Li, referring to expanding the LLM’s size by increasing its parameter count to boost its learning and generalisation capacity.

SenseTime co-founder, chairman and chief executive Xu Li, stage right, conducts a live demonstration of the SenseNova 5.0 large language model during the company’s Tech Day event in Shanghai on Tuesday. Photo: Handout
Major advances in the 5.0 version of SenseNova, which made its debut in April 2023, focus on knowledge, mathematics, reasoning and coding capabilities, according to Xu.
The unexpected surge of SenseTime’s shares reflects continued investor enthusiasm in LLM projects in China, where there are currently more than 200 domestic-developed AI models in the market amid efforts to catch up with recent innovations by the likes of OpenAI and Google.

Given the same knowledge input, SenseNova 5.0 provides better comprehension, summarisation, and question and answers to support vertical applications such as in the education and the content industries, according to a SenseTime statement. The updated LLM is also touted to have “best-in-class mathematical, coding and reasoning capabilities, providing a solid foundation for applications in finance and data analysis”.

SenseNova 5.0 also supports high-definition image parsing and understanding, as well as text-to-image generation, according to SenseTime. In addition, the LLM’s latest iteration also extracts complex data across documents and summarises answers to questions, “offering strong multimodal interaction capability”.

A view of the global headquarters of artificial intelligence company SenseTime at the Hong Kong Science Park on December 13, 2021. Photo: AFP

The updated LLM, according to SenseTime, had undergone more than 10 terabytes of token training, covering a large amount of synthetic data, which has boosted its context window coverage – referring to the swathe of text that an AI model can process during conversation with users – to about 200,000.

At the Shanghai event, SenseTime’s Xu predicted that device-based LLMs will see exponential growth this year, as more AI-enabled personal computers, smartphones and smart cars become available in the market.
SenseTime has been known as one of China’s “four dragons” of AI focused on advanced facial recognition technology, along with peers Megvii, Cloudwalk Technology and Yitu Technology. All four companies have also been put on Washington’s Entity List, which restricts their access to US technologies and suppliers.
Since its trading debut in December 2021, SenseTime has seen its shares flounder as it struggled to be commercially viable under US sanctions, which prompted it to restructure operations last year. The company reported losses of 6.5 billion yuan (US$897 million) in 2023, as revenue declined 10.6 per cent year on year to 3.4 billion yuan.
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