SenseTime, a leading AI technology company from China, has unveiled its upgraded SenseNova 5.5 model, which boasts a 30% increase in overall performance from its predecessor, SenseNova 5. The company has touted the model as being on par with GPT-4 Turbo, and released benchmark scores that show it outperforming GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.5 models.
Furthermore, SenseTime made public the news of SenseNova 5o, the first real-time multimodal model from China, capable of text, image, audio, and video processing. The demonstration of SenseNova 5o’s interaction capabilities is reportedly equivalent to those of GPT-4o.
Simultaneously, the company unveiled a “Lite” version of SenseNova 5.5, intended to run on-device as a low-cost cloud-to-edge model. This technology is designed to be highly affordable, with an estimated annual cost of RMB 9.90 per device. They also introduced Vimi, a controllable AI avatar video generator capable of crafting one-minute videos with just a single photo prompt, providing precise control over facial expressions and upper body movements.
The advancements come at an interesting time, as American organization OpenAI will cease providing Chinese users with API access to their tools and services due to US sanctions on tech exports to China. This action has prompted Chinese firms to seek alternatives, with SenseTime launching “Project $0 Go,” a comprehensive onboarding bundle aimed at enticing users to shift from OpenAI’s platforms to SenseTime’s.
Other Chinese AI developers such as Baidu, Zhipu, and Tencent are also offering significant incentives for businesses to make the switch to their platforms. This scramble by Chinese firms to scoop up the AI market share from OpenAI may in turn boost the progression of the country’s homegrown AI technology.
The shift is also raising questions in the US market—American developers may be watching Chinese AI models like SenseTime’s SenseNova and Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen models explode in popularity, prompting thoughts of whether to wait for US companies like OpenAI and Google to progress their products, or make a move to adopt Chinese models.
