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By Josh Ye
HONG KONG, April 10 (Reuters) - China's SenseTime unveiled on Monday a slew of new artificial
intelligence-powered products including a chatbot and image
generator, joining a global race ignited by the popularity of
OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Xu Li, CEO and co-founder of one of China's largest AI
firms, showed a live demonstration of the chatbot they called
"SenseChat" writing an email and telling a story about a cat
catching a fish when prompted by questions, as well as scripting
computer codes.
The products were based off the latest version of the
company's SenseNova big model, which they have been developing
over the past five years, SenseTime's other co-founder Wang
Xiaogang said. Big models are typically trained on massive
datasets using powerful hardware.
Global interest in AI technology has soared since the debut
in late 2022 of ChatGPT, a popular chat bot developed by U.S.
company OpenAI which uses generative AI technology that learns
from past data to create new text, images or computer code. Some
governments are weighing the merits of AI, including risks such
as privacy and copyright infringement.
"We have been focusing on developing our big models. In
addition to our powerful AI infrastructure ... SenseTime has
also developed the ability to deploy big models across our
product line," said SenseTime's co-founder Wang Xiaogang, adding
that SenseChat contained more than 100 billion parameters.
The company, which has been sanctioned by the U.S., did not
provide detailed plans for a product roll out, but said
attendees could try out the products.
In addition to SenseChat, the company also showcased an
image generator, a digital avatar creation platform and a pair
of complementary 3D modeling tools at the event.
These applications are meant to work in tandem to help
SenseTime's clients to quickly create video in which the
presenter, the environment and the products are all generated by
AI in real time.
"We can generate a digital scene for a livestreaming room.
The product creation and interactive content are all generated
by AI, and the livestreaming room runs non-stop 24 hours a day,"
Xu said. "In fact, you may not even be able to tell whether it
is a real person doing the broadcasting at night."
Shares in SenseTime, which is best known for its computer
vision technology, soared last week after the company began
sending out invitations for the event. The Hong Kong market,
where the company trades, was shut for a public holiday on
Monday.
A number of Chinese companies have been working on their own
versions, including Chinese search engine giant Baidu which saw its shares plunge and then rebound after it unveiled
its Ernie Bot last month. Ernie Bot is now open to a limited
number of public testers.
In 2019, the United States put SenseTime on a trade
blacklist after accusing it of developing facial recognition
programmes that facilitate Beijing's surveillance of ethnic
Uyghurs in its Xinjiang region.
SenseTime said at the time that it strongly opposed the U.S.
ban and would work with relevant authorities to resolve the
situation.
Chinese tech companies are rushing to launch their answers
to OpenAI's ChatGPT with Alibaba Group expected to
launch its Tongyi Qianwen AI chatbot on Tuesday.
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(Reporting by Josh Ye; Writing by Brenda Goh; Editing by John
Stonestreet and Jacqueline Wong)
Reuters Messaging:
rm://brenda.goh.thomsonreuters.com@reuters.net/))
