Chinese artificial intelligence startup SenseTime is joining the big league in China with its recent appointment by the government as the fifth member of its national team. The startup joins China’s BAT — Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent — as well as voice intelligence specialist iFlyTek as central to the Chinese government’s plan to own AI of the future.
SenseTime has been selected for its facial recognition technology. Each Chinese company has their own specialty – Baidu for autonomous driving, Alibaba for smart city initiatives, Tencent for computer vision in medical diagnoses and iFlyTek for speech recognition.
SenseTime is the AI startup that grew up from research at the Hong Kong Science & Technology Park. It went on to raise funding at a valuation of $4.5 billion as the highest valued AI startup in the world. Co-founder Dr. Li Xu won the Silicon Dragon founder of the Year award in 2017.
China is moving ahead rapidly in implementing AI although the U.S. still has the edge in scientific and research underpinnings, says Kai-Fu Lee, chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures and author of AI Superpowers. See video of his bay-side chat with Silicon Dragon.
But China is determined to put its stamp on this important technology. By 2030, China aims to be a world leading innovator in AI.
China is on its way. Last year, venture capital on AI startups in China surpassed the U.S., raising $4.9 billion for 19 investments while the U.S. invested $4.4 billion in 155 startups, according to ABI Research. The statistics reflect a focus on mature AI applications with strong commercial vitality and successful uses case, the research firm pointed out.
Sensetime is one of those companies that is at the forefront even though it only started out four years ago.
