By Sherry Qin and Kimberley Kao
SenseTime's shares rose sharply and were halted after the Chinese artificial-intelligence specialist unveiled a large-language model that it said rivals OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo.
Shares of the AI software company surged in early Hong Kong trading on Wednesday and were 31% higher when they were halted midmorning. The gain trimmed year-to-date losses to 31% and 12-month losses to 68%.
The advance came after SenseTime presented its latest generative AI model at an event Tuesday, saying it had improved its linguistic, creative and scientific capabilities, according to a company statement.
SenseNova 5.0, an update of SenseTime's first LLM introduced a year ago, has "met or exceeded GPT-4 Turbo in mainstream objective evaluations," the company said.
The release offers some hope to investors who have witnessed one of China's AI software pioneers falter since its initial public offering in late 2021. Backed by investors including SoftBank, SenseTime raised more than $700 million in the offering, becoming the first of China's four "AI dragons" to go public. It said then that it was the largest AI software company in Asia.
The company briefly had a market capitalization of $35 billion in January 2022 before steadily selling off. Shares last week hit an all-time closing low, with the market cap now closer to $2.5 billion.
Yeap Jun Rong, a market strategist at online brokerage IG, said Wednesday's buying frenzy amounted to investors pricing in "potential in widespread adoption across various industries."
"Markets have been attributing strong premium to any companies with significant exposure to the development of generative AI," Yeap said. Still, the broader downward trend of SenseTime shares indicates that investors still have reservations about its products, he said. "More clarity is needed, and there still seems much to be proven."
Write to Sherry Qin at sherry.qin@wsj.com and Kimberley Kao at kimberley.kao@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 24, 2024 01:17 ET (05:17 GMT)
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