Seventeen days ago, an announcement of a delayed IPO added uncertainty to SenseTime, which could have become the first stock of AI in Hong Kong.
Today, 17 days later, SenseTime officially rang the bell on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, rising 22% after opening.
17 days ago, because the US Treasury Department suddenly announced that SenseTime would be added to the list of so-called "Chinese military complex enterprises", in order to protect the interests of investors, SenseTime chose to postpone the listing, but it still firmly promoted the IPO. The return of SenseTime is not only another milestone for its company, but also represents the rise of Hard Technology in China, building confidence and belief in industrial innovation and development.
As SenseTime Chairman and CEO Xu Li said at the listing ceremony: "Enterprises in each era carry different hopes and responsibilities. The inheritance of China's entrepreneurial spirit from generation to generation has jointly spawned the magnificent scene of the past for more than 40 years, and has pushed our proposition from survival and catching up to development and pioneering. ”
The undead SenseTime IPO can't stop China's hard technology.
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Hard technology is the future
The competition for hard technology is related to the future of the country, especially the big powers.
After more than 40 years of reform and opening up, China has a certain strength in the field of hard science and technology, and is developing in a bigger and stronger direction. However, the road to high-tech development is not an easy road.
In order to maintain their existing status, developed countries rely on their high-tech advantages to impose various sanctions on Chinese companies, the most common method is to include Chinese technology companies in the entity list to achieve restrictions on their business with U.S. companies, Huawei, ZTE, SMIC, including this time SenseTime, in the list.
In addition to targeting real businesses, the United States often uses financial means.
On May 20, 2020, the U.S. Senate passed the Accountability Act for Controlling Foreign Companies, which addresses the accounting problems of Chinese companies, and if it cannot obtain the right to inspect Chinese accounting companies from the US regulatory authorities within three years, Chinese companies will have to be delisted from the US stock exchange, which is also the root cause of the wave of sharp declines in Chinese stocks.
At the same time, the United States has also extended its hand to the Chinese stock market.
In 2020, it was rumored that the Trump administration had blocked U.S. pension funds from investing in China's stock market, and had issued an executive order prohibiting U.S. capital from trading securities of 31 Chinese companies. At the same time, the United States has also used various means to create obstacles to the listing and financing of Chinese high-tech companies, and this time it is a typical case to carry out targeted suppression with unwarranted reasons at the critical time when SenseTime is about to IPO.
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In the competition for hard technology, artificial intelligence is indispensable
Production and social activities are indispensable for human beings to maintain their survival and development, and how to carry out these two types of activities with high efficiency and low cost is the tireless pursuit of human beings for thousands of years.
However, having experienced three industrial revolutions, what will we rely on in the future?
Artificial intelligence is a universally accepted new technology. With artificial intelligence, more production and social activities will be automated, efficiency and cost will be greatly improved, and artificial intelligence will master the learning ability similar to the human brain, and the economic and social benefits will far exceed the previous three industrial revolutions.
Artificial intelligence is also a transformative basic technology that has a profound impact on human development, and the underlying technologies of autonomous driving, intelligent transportation, intelligent interaction, and unmanned factories are now in full swing.
Fortunately, this wave of technology, China is no longer a spectator, but a player who enters the game, and China has also shown a good strength in artificial intelligence, which is the fundamental reason why the United States is chasing and blocking the AI leader represented by SenseTime.
Back to business, such an important technological revolution, the business opportunities implied are also very large.
According to the authoritative body - Sullivan's report, by 2025, the global business value of artificial intelligence empowerment will reach 10 trillion US dollars, equivalent to half of the US GDP in 2020; in 2025, global artificial intelligence technology expenditure (including artificial intelligence software, hardware and services) will reach 221.2 billion US dollars, with a compound annual growth rate of 26.3%, of which artificial intelligence software will become the fastest growing and largest sector in the artificial intelligence technology market. It is expected to account for about 55.1% of the global artificial intelligence technology market in 2025, with a market size of 121.8 billion US dollars and a compound annual growth rate of 31.9%.
China is the second largest artificial intelligence software market after the United States, and is expected to reach 167.1 billion yuan by 2025, with a compound annual growth rate of 41.5%, the fastest growing market in the world's major markets, and its contribution to the Chinese software market will rise from 9.0% in 2020 to 24.1% in 2025.
Among them, senseTime's computer vision software is the largest segment in the four segments of artificial intelligence software, and the size of the Chinese market alone is expected to exceed 100 billion by 2025, with a compound annual growth rate of 43.5%, accounting for 23.0% of the global computer vision software market share from 18.0% in 2020 to 23.0% in 2025.
Nowadays, artificial intelligence technology is in the ascendant, the underlying technology and algorithm have basically matured, and the bottleneck of development lies in the deep integration of application scenarios. "There is a continuous large-scale investment in technology to bring innovation, and then there is business model development, which is a rare road, and the difficulty lies in the uncertainty of business." Xu Li said in his speech at the listing ceremony.
However, it is gratifying that under the impetus of 5G technology, the rapid development of the Internet of Things and the industrial Internet has provided more and more application scenarios for artificial intelligence, and artificial intelligence provides industry opportunities, efficiency improvement and cost reduction benefits for manufacturers who quickly achieve large-scale production, which in turn also promotes the deep integration of artificial intelligence and application scenarios.
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Game breakers: leading a new era of AI "industrial production"
Returning to the industry level, the sign that artificial intelligence has begun to change the world is that technology is moving from the laboratory to the application and can land in a single industry.
SenseTime calls this stage the "Breaking Through the Industrial Red Line" stage.
At this stage, SenseTime preemptively completed the important leap from technology to business. The company has independently developed and established the world's top deep learning platform and supercomputing center, and has quickly landed in multiple tracks such as image recognition, text recognition, medical image recognition, video analysis and automatic driving.
Since the outbreak of the epidemic, the wave of digitalization in China has accelerated, and the process of comprehensive digitization and intelligence has been advanced by three to four years. The industrial side has generated huge demand, accelerated the development of artificial intelligence, and entered a new era of "industrial production". Unlike the previous stage, the new stage is not an order of magnitude for the transformation of society as a whole; but on the other hand, the demand of the new stage is highly complex and diverse, which challenges technology companies as supply-side. In fact, bottlenecks from the supply side are the main pain points of the current development of artificial intelligence. As application scenarios enter the large-scale landing period of fragmentation, the landing capabilities of AI enterprises are differentiated.
In this trend, the AI leader represented by SenseTime takes the lead in breaking the game. In addition to the relatively concentrated industries, SenseTime has taken the lead in entering smart city scenarios, comprehensive business scenarios such as real estate and finance, intelligent life such as cultural tourism and education, and intelligent automobile fields, driving the industrialization of artificial intelligence from general application scenarios to more industry-specific scenarios.
This is no easy task. The long-tail fragmentation of AI application scenarios is obvious, and different scenarios have different requirements for artificial intelligence algorithms, requiring customized development of algorithms for different scenarios; it is also necessary to form a landing scene from point to surface to integrate vertical specific applications. However, for fragmented application scenarios, it is not enough to simply adopt a custom model, which will lead to extremely low efficiency and loss of scale effect advantage. This is what Makes sense is a rare feature – it can meet specific needs, but also achieve large-scale AI model production, and achieve the results of AI cost reduction and efficiency.
In fact, SenseTime is the first to bring the "long-tail application" problem to the offline physical world. While other companies are doing AI applications in a single scenario, SenseTime has built a mature AI production platform. In terms of forward-looking, it can be said that no one can stand out.
The "base" of SenseTime's AI production platform is senseCore, an AI device. It is the integration of SenseTime's AI technology strength in recent years, opening up the link and collaboration between ultra-large-scale computing power, rich algorithm models, and full-link AI development platforms, and building a complete set of end-to-end architecture system, becoming an unprecedented new infrastructure in the industry. As Professor Lin Dahua, co-founder of SenseTime and director of the Hong Kong Chinese-SenseTime Joint Laboratory, said, the AI device "is a key step in shifting the original project-based customized development to large-scale landing". SenseCore will enable AI to be produced and implemented in an automated and adaptive manner, significantly reducing the cost of R&D and deployment of AI solutions, and solving long-tail application problems in urban management, enterprise services, and personal life. Lin Dahua also believes that this marks that SenseTime's internal AI research and development and production has entered a new stage.
SenseTime does not stop here, further supports the algorithm model production chain of different industries in SenseCore, connects and opens up the cross-industry technology system, and forms a technology ecology that breaks through the technical boundary. At present, SenseTime has 22,000 AI models, and in such an efficient operating model, SenseTime will build thousands of models in the future to fully meet the long-tail application scenarios, including solving the problem of many scenarios with low data volume, low frequency but very important scenes.
For example, for the complex application scenario of high-speed rail catenary, SenseTime provides the empowerment of AI technology. As one of the main channels of the "eight vertical and eight horizontal" high-speed railway, the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway has a total length of 1318km, the earliest high-speed rail departs at 7:00 in the morning, the latest high-speed rail arrives at 23:23 at night, and the passenger traffic in 2020 will reach 130 million person-times, bearing the important national transportation capacity. Catenary is a backup-free power supply system erected along the railway tracks, which is in close contact with the pantograph hundreds of times a day to transmit electricity to high-speed trains. In order to ensure the continuous and healthy operation of the catenary, SenseTime, China Railway Electrification Bureau Group Beijing-Shanghai High-speed Rail Vascular Company, China Railway Electrification Institute, and the "Starry Sky" 4C (Catenary Suspension Status Monitoring Device) intelligent analysis system jointly developed by SenseTime and china railway electrification bureau group, the identification and comparative analysis of catenary 4C images, achieved remarkable results.
It is understood that in terms of algorithm technology, in order to adapt to the complex scenarios of high-speed rail catenary, SenseTime integrates traditional visual algorithms and deep learning algorithms. At the same time, relying on the supercomputing platform of SenseCore's AI large device, compared with the traditional method, with the help of the "Starry Sky" system, the picture detection of the high-speed rail catenary is carried out in the form of intelligent identification + manual review, and the number of suspected defects detected can reach 3 to 8 times the number of pure labor.
It is reported that as of now, the national high-speed rail analyzed by the starry sky system has exceeded 30,000 kilometers, the number of pictures has exceeded 48 million, and the number of parts has exceeded 1.3 billion. China is a global leader in high-speed rail technology and is rapidly going abroad. SenseTime has effectively helped improve the quality of high-speed rail and helped China's high-speed rail go global.
At present, SenseTime has formed a number of intelligent platforms including smart business, smart city, smart life, smart car and so on. By reducing the production cost of AI models and landing AI technology on a large scale, SenseTime has quickly become a technology enabler and change leader in various industries.
As we all know, a small change brought about by AI can make a very big change in the efficiency of the industry. SenseTime's super scientific and technological strength and landing ability in the field of AI are the guarantee for the rapid commercialization of artificial intelligence.
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epilogue
Standing at the moment of major changes unprecedented in a century, science and technology is not only the primary productive force, but also an important guarantee for national stability, social development, people living and working in peace and contentment, and the great rejuvenation of the nation.
In a word, science and technology prosper, the country prospers, the people prosper, and the nation prospers.
It is gratifying that China today, in the face of important industries and technologies representing the future, has the ability to compete and has taken a solid step. The artificial intelligence industry is by no means a smooth road, which requires a lot of investment, a large number of talents, and also needs to withstand loneliness. From SenseTime's insistence on promoting IPO to the final realization of the listing, we have seen the perseverance and perseverance of Chinese technology companies. This also proves that the various unwarranted suppression of Chinese AI companies such as SenseTime will not prevent its development; the pursuit and interception of China's hard technology will not ultimately stop its rise.
"Historically, there have been anti-progress theories and anti-technology theories, and the epidemic has also triggered a pause in globalization, and geopolitical factors have led to SenseTime being repeatedly suppressed by the United States for no reason. However, SenseTime has always believed that the incremental value brought by the transformation of artificial intelligence technology will surely promote the arrival of an intelligent era of inclusiveness and fairness. ”
China has a huge market, a large number of engineer reserves, an increasingly perfect capital market, and the country's firm confidence and determination to develop, SenseTime will still continue to promote the construction of artificial intelligence infrastructure, empower hundreds of industries, and benefit everyone through continuous technological innovation and continuous commercial exploration.
Use AI to shine a thousand points of heat in the era.