"That's when we learned that there was the first Chinese driver to enter F1. When Guanyu made his debut in 22 years, there was already the logo of our SenseTime Chinese characters on the body. Just like when SenseTime went to sea, many people thought that square words and technology may not be linked, but we hope to use the efforts of a generation to change everyone's perception in a real sense - square words can represent high technology. I believe that our combination with F1 and Guanyu can reshape everyone's perception of China's speed. ”
On April 12, Xu Li, Chairman and CEO of SenseTime, had a high-end conversation with China's first F1® driver, Zhou Guanyu, about his original intention of supporting F1 driver Zhou Guanyu.
From April 19th to 21st, the world's most anticipated F1 Grand Prix will return to Shanghai, where China's first F1 driver, Zhou Guanyu, will make his home debut. As one of the world's top three sporting events, this year's F1 Shanghai is expected to attract more than 200,000 spectators.
Therefore, the dialogue between F1® driver Zhou Guanyu and Xu Li, CEO of SenseTime, is particularly eye-catching.
It is understood that as early as 2022, SenseTime has entered the F1 arena and reached a technical cooperation with Zhou Guanyu's team, KICK Sauber F1 Team (formerly Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN), using SenseTime's AI technology to optimize the team's decision-making process and race strategy and help the team's performance improve.
At that time, Chinese driver Zhou Guanyu made his debut as an F1 competitor in this top international race. Since then, SenseTime has accompanied Zhou Guanyu in F1, and from 2022 to now, the two sides have walked hand in hand for three years and returned to the home stadium together.
At the event, Zhou Guanyu said: "When I achieved a breakthrough from 0 to 1 and came to F1 - a competitive sports venue that may not belong to Chinese and Chinese drivers, with Chinese brands like SenseTime joining me, we Chinese and Chinese technology can go to the world stage, which is also an encouragement and pride for me, and I am very happy to work with SenseTime." ”
It is worth noting that what is printed on Zhou Guanyu's racing car this year is a special edition logo of SenseTime - SenseTime X.O. X.O. is the abbreviation of Professor Tang Xiaoou, the founder of SenseTime and a computer scientist, implying that SenseTime will not forget its original intention, adhere to originality, and let AI lead human progress.
As the first Chinese F1 driver, Zhou Guanyu's every breakthrough is refreshing the history of Chinese racing. Similarly, from the beginning of its establishment, SenseTime has always adhered to originality and explored the "no man's land" of science and technology.
From the early DeepID series of face recognition algorithms, which surpassed the accuracy of human eye recognition for the first time in the world, to the establishment of SenseTime, one of Asia's largest supercomputing centers, SenseTime Artificial Intelligence Computing Center (AIDC), SenseTime has created many new histories of Chinese AI along the way.
Since the release of "Daily New" in April 2023, the SenseTime model has been rapidly iterated at a rate of one version in 2-3 months, and has completed four rounds of updates and upgrades in just 10 months. In the latest version 4.0, the comprehensive evaluation score of SenseChat V4 has surpassed GPT-3.5 and is comparable to GPT-4, and will be released again in April this year.
In fact, as early as 2017, SenseTime established a long-term strategic cooperation with Honda, becoming the first AI company in Asia to cooperate with the world's top five car brands to develop autonomous driving technology, which also makes SenseTime form a deep accumulation in the field of smart cars. In 2021, SenseTime launched the SenseAuto intelligent vehicle platform, including full-stack platforms such as intelligent driving, intelligent cabin, and vehicle-road collaboration.
"Working with Zhou Guanyu's F1 team, in fact, I still have a little 'selfishness'," Xu Li said: "'Jueying' is Cao Cao's mount in the Three Kingdoms, which reflects our pursuit of speed. If the technology of our car is going to enter thousands of households, the first thing to do is to enter the fastest car in the world, which is F1. ”
In the cooperation, SenseTime has transformed its fruitful research results and application experience in the fields of artificial intelligence large models and smart cars into AI solutions suitable for F1 sports.
"We have been with us all the way for 3 years, with many glory and highlight moments, as well as many difficulties, setbacks and companionship. I think the most important thing is that SenseTime has brought some key AI technologies to the team and me, so that our strategy in the race can be more optimized. Zhou Guanyu said.
In addition to helping teams and drivers improve their race performance, SenseTime will also make a digital human version of "Xiao Zhou" for Zhou Guanyu through this meeting at the Shanghai home stadium, so that more people can feel the charm of racing through digital humans to popularize F1 sports, intelligent commentary of events, and fan interaction.
In Xu Li's view, the settled application of large models, AI+ sports is a major potential direction for the development of large models in the future. Based on its own visual model system, SenseTime has created a multi-camera visual motion capture system, which can realize intelligent highlight moment capture, wonderful moment generation, technical data statistics, action analysis and judgment, event live broadcast support and other functions, assist athletes in performance ability analysis, and improve athletic ability.
For example, in the SenseShot smart basketball court, by capturing the three-dimensional coordinates of people and balls in space, it can realize automatic camera following, personal video highlight generation, and analysis of people's movement characteristics in different sports states, providing players with detailed data and statistics to help analyze and improve basketball skills.
In addition, SenseTime's AI technology also brings richer and more intuitive display effects to the live broadcast of the event. For example, in the table tennis competition, SenseTime successfully realized the data collection and visual broadcast of table tennis events through 3D motion capture technology and AR special effects rendering engine. Not only can you see the trajectory and landing point of the table tennis ball, but you can also visualize the speed and direction of rotation of the ball.
On the day of the dialogue, SenseTime reached a strategic cooperation with Five Star Sports, a media organization specializing in sports media operation and digital content production, and the two parties will carry out in-depth cooperation in the fields of live event broadcasting, sports capture, digital human anchoring, and video production, so as to provide sports audiences with a better rich and personalized audio-visual viewing experience.
"When we first started our business 10 years ago, we said that we could be a world leader in the field of visual perception, and there were many voices of skepticism. But China's biggest feature is its huge scene dividends and advantages. After superimposing this advantage, in the era of perceptual intelligence or intelligence 1.0, Chinese enterprises have come to the forefront of the world. We also have strong belief and confidence in generative AI today. Xu Li said.
"Artificial intelligence needs to be combined with scene data and fall into application scenarios - and China has a broad scenario base, so it can go deep into the industry and take a completely different route in the vertical field. It's like what people call the 'ChatGPT moment' these days, not the GPT moment. Because GPT is a technical route, it has become an industry consensus. But in the real sense, it is a household name and the public recognizes this thing, because there is a Chat in front of it, which is a chat application. Xu Li said: "There is no shortage of application scenarios in China. The superimposed application of each technology can truly bring about a moment of industrialization and revolutionization, which is also an opportunity for us in China. ”
Xu Li believes: "As long as AI companies persist in the scene and move forward, then the results it can bring will be beyond imagination." Just like in the 1.0 era, a large number of AI companies started up in the early days, and no one thought that they would be able to go to the forefront of the West, but in different vertical fields and AI+ eras, each company has its own characteristics. ”
Not only Zhou Guanyu will be at home, but Shanghai-based SenseTime will also usher in the SenseTime Technology Sharing Day in April, when SenseTime will release a series of new large-scale model technologies and applications.