SenseTime seeks suspension after stock price soars
Chinese AI giant stages unexpected rally a day after the launch of its updated SenseNova LLM
Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) giant SenseTime Group halted trading of its shares in Hong Kong after they surged by more than 30 per cent yesterday morning following the launch of its updated SenseNova large language model (LLM), which the firm claims to be on a 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 yesterday, pending “the release of an announcement which may constitute inside information of the company”, after its shares rose by as much as 36 per cent. They last traded at 80 HK cents.
The 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 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,” Xu said, referring to expanding the LLM’s size by increasing its parameter count to boost its learning and generalisation capacity.
Major advances in the 5.0 version of SenseNova, which made its debut in April last year, focus on knowledge, mathematics, reasoning and coding capabilities, according to Xu.
The unexpected surge in 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 questions and answers to support vertical applications such as in the education and 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 textto-image generation, according to SenseTime.
The updated LLM, according to SenseTime, has 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, Xu predicted device-based LLMs would see exponential growth this year, as more AI-enabled personal computers, smartphones and smart cars became available in the market.
Since their trading debut in December 2021, the shares of SenseTime have floundered as the firm 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 (HK$7 billion) last year as revenue declined by 10.6 per cent year on year to 3.4 billion yuan.