Sanctioned Chinese AI Firm SenseTime Releases Image Model Built for Speed

A striking development has emerged in artificial intelligence. Zeyi Yang Business Apr 29, 2026 1:23 PM Sanctioned Chinese AI Firm SenseTime Releases Image Model Built for Speed With US restrictions limiting its access to advanced tech, SenseTime is doubling down on open source with a new model optimized to run on Chinese-made chips. Photograph: Lam Yik/Getty Images Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story SenseTime, a Chinese AI company best known for its facial recognition technology, released a new open source model on Tuesday that it claims can both generate and interpret images far faster than top models developed by US competitors. SenseNova U1 could help the company reclaim lost ground after it slipped from its place among the leading players in China’s AI development race.

The model’s secret sauce is its ability to “read” images without translating them to text first, speeding up the process and reducing the amount of computing power required. “The model’s entire reasoning process is no longer limited to text. It can reason with images as well,” Dahua Lin, cofounder and chief scientist at SenseTime, said in an interview with WIRED.

Technical Details

Lin, who is also a professor of information engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, says that models capable of processing images directly will enable robots to better understand the physical world in the future. Like DeepSeek's latest flagship model, SenseTime says U1 can be powered by Chinese-made chips. “Several Chinese domestic chipmakers have finished optimizing compatibility with our new model,” Lin says.

On release day, 10 Chinese chip designers, including Cambricon and Biren Technology, announced their hardware supports U1. That flexibility matters because US export controls restrict Chinese firms from accessing the world's most advanced AI chips, particularly those used for training, which at this point are primarily developed by Western companies like Nvidia. “We will continue to push for training on more different chips,” Lin says.

But he also acknowledges that SenseTime “may still need to use the best chips to ensure the speed of our iteration. ” SenseTime released U1 for free on Hugging Face and GitHub, another sign of how Chinese companies are becoming some of the most active contributors to open source AI. SenseTime was founded in 2014 and became a world leader in computer vision, which is used in applications like facial recognition and autonomous driving.

But when ChatGPT and other AI systems powered by natural language processing became the hottest thing in the tech industry, SenseTime began struggling to turn a profit and fell behind newer Chinese startups like DeepSeek and MiniMax. SenseTime says it hopes that releasing SenseNova-U1 publicly for anyone to use will help it catch up with both domestic and Western AI players.

This advance offers important signals about the future of the sector, and the tech world is watching closely.