SenseTime, Chinese An AI company best known for its own facial recognition technology, released a new open-source model on Tuesday that it claims can generate and interpret images faster than more advanced models made by American competitors. SenseNova U1 can help a company regain lost ground after slipping from its central position leading players in China’s AI development race.
The secret sauce of the model is its ability to “read” images without first translating them into text, speeding up the process and reducing the amount of computing power required. “The whole thinking process of the model is not limited to text anymore. It can communicate with images as well,” Dahua Lin, co-founder and chief scientist at SenseTime, said in an interview with WIRED.
Lin, who is also a professor of information engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, says that models capable of automatic image processing will enable robots to better understand the physical world in the future.
Like the latest DeepSeek model, SenseTime says the U1 can be powered by Chinese-made chips. “Several Chinese domestic chip makers have already upgraded compatibility with our new model,” Lin says. On the day of the release, 10 Chinese chip designers, including Cambricon and Biren Technology, announced their devices supporting U1.
That flexibility is important for a reason US export control preventing Chinese companies from accessing the world’s most advanced AI chips, especially those used for training, which are currently being developed by Western companies such as Nvidia. “We will continue to push to get training on more different chips,” Lin says. But he also admits that SenseTime “may still need to use better chips to ensure the speed of our improvements.”
SenseTime released the U1 for free on Hugging Face and GitHub, another sign of how Chinese companies are becoming active contributors to open source AI.
SenseTime was founded in 2014 and became a world leader in computer vision, which is used in applications such as facial recognition and autonomous driving. But while ChatGPT and other AI systems powered by natural language processing became the hottest thing in the tech industry, SenseTime began to struggle to turn a profit and fell behind new Chinese startups like DeepSeek and MiniMax.
SenseTime says it hopes that releasing the SenseNova-U1 publicly for anyone to use will help find local and Western AI players. Lin says the company finally made the decision last year to focus on open source because of the beneficial feedback it gets from researchers, which enables the company to iterate quickly. “These days, being open source or closed source isn’t the winning factor; speed of iteration is,” Lin explains.
Open source also helps SenseTime continue to collaborate with international researchers without the interference of geopolitics. The company has been repeatedly sanctioned by the U.S. government in recent years over allegations that its facial recognition technology helped force surveillance systems used to track and detain Uyghurs and other minority groups in China’s Xinjiang region. As a result, US companies are prohibited from investing in SenseTime and selling certain technologies to it without a license. (SenseTime has denied the claims.)
Seeing Clearly
In the accompanying technical report, SenseTime claims that the SenseNova-U1 produces higher quality images than open source models currently on the market. Its performance is comparable to Chinese closed-source architectures such as Alibaba’s Qwen and ByteDance’s Seedream, but it still lags behind industry leaders such as GPT-Image-2.0, which came out a week ago.
But the main selling point of the model is its ability to produce images faster than all those models. It’s based on an innovative technology called NEO-Unify that SenseTime previewed earlier this year.
