SenseTime Group Inc. experienced a significant increase in its share prices on Tuesday due to the mounting speculation that the Chinese AI giant was gearing up to launch its own competitor to the popular artificial intelligence system ChatGPT.
The stock prices soared by up to 18% as rumors circulated on social media about the upcoming launch of a new AI model by the SoftBank Group Corp.-backed company, putting it in line with numerous other software companies vying to compete with OpenAI.
A representative from SenseTime confirmed that the company would soon issue media invitations to an event, but no further details were provided.
“They are going to launch a large model next week, on the 10th of April,” said CMB International analyst Marley Ngan. The product will likely relate to AI-generated content, she added. “The management talked about this during the results announcement last week. They sent out the invitation today.”
SenseTime, a company based in Shanghai and renowned for its leadership in AI-based computer vision, is reportedly entering the increasingly crowded market of generative AI, which encompasses image creation services like Midjourney and OpenAI’s Dall-E, and conversational bots such as ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.
These services have captured the public’s imagination and triggered a race to perfect the emerging technology.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has made responding to OpenAI’s ChatGPT a top priority, while Microsoft has invested $10 billion in the Silicon Valley startup led by Sam Altman.
In China, Baidu Inc. is the frontrunner in the competitive landscape of generative AI, having introduced its offering called Ernie Bot, which received a mixed response.
Baidu plans to integrate Ernie into its search and other software services in a similar way to Microsoft’s integration of ChatGPT into its Edge browser and Google’s use of Bard to enhance search results.
