On October 22nd, Xu Li, Chairman and CEO of SenseTime Technology, sent a letter to all employees, establishing the three in one strategy of "large equipment large model application", which was mentioned for the first time. After the release of the full staff letter by SenseTime Technology, organizational adjustments and layoffs were immediately initiated, with a focus on retaining the two businesses related to the RiRiXin large model and large equipment. The remaining business lines, including security, autonomous driving, medical, etc., began to be adjusted, and the compensation given was N+1.

On October 23rd, in response to the online rumors of layoffs, SenseTime Technology stated that it is actively promoting strategic transformation, focusing on key business and strategic growth areas of "large equipment large model application", and optimizing and adjusting its organizational and talent structure to better meet business development needs. At present, SenseTime's social recruitment and campus recruitment are proceeding normally, and the overall business is developing steadily.

According to data, SenseTime was founded in 2014, focusing on computer vision and deep learning technology, and is a leading global artificial intelligence platform company. According to the Frost&Sullivan report, SenseTime is the largest artificial intelligence software company in Asia by revenue in 2020 and also the largest computer vision software provider in China, with a market share of 11%.

01. SenseTime responds to layoffs
Recently, on the occasion of SenseTime's 10th anniversary, Chairman Xu Lifa issued an internal letter to all employees, mentioning for the first time the company's newly established "big device big model application" three in one strategy, and announcing the acceleration of the lightweight process of organization and management.

According to reports, after the full staff letter was sent out, SenseTime initiated organizational adjustments and layoffs on the same day. At present, layoffs are still in progress. "Shanghai has vacated a large conference room", and the scale of layoffs is unknown. The compensation is N+1. SenseTime has focused on retaining two businesses related to the RiRixin large model and large equipment, while the remaining business lines including security, autonomous driving, and medical have begun to adjust. Due to the "one size fits all" layoffs and the lack of breathing space, it has caused dissatisfaction among employees.

At present, in response to the layoffs, SenseTime Technology has stated that it is actively promoting strategic transformation, optimizing and adjusting its organizational and talent structure to better meet business development needs. At present, SenseTime's social recruitment and campus recruitment are proceeding normally, and the overall business is developing steadily.

In fact, this is not the first time that SenseTime has reported layoffs. It is reported that in August last year, multiple business groups within SenseTime experienced layoffs. Some laid-off employees stated that the company promised to provide compensation according to the "N+2" standard, and the company has carried out layoffs in June 2022 and April 2023.
02. The company has suffered losses for several consecutive years and its market value has severely shrunk

SenseTime was founded in 2014 by Professor Tang Xiaoou from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Several core members of the founding team, including Tang Xiaoou, Xu Li, Wang Xiaogang, and Xu Bing, are well-known scientists in the field of artificial intelligence. Tang Xiaoou and Wang Xiaogang graduated with doctoral degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while Xu Li and Xu Bing graduated with doctoral degrees from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

At its inception, it was favored by capital and has completed 12 rounds of financing since its establishment in 2014, with a total financing amount of 5.2 billion US dollars and a post financing valuation of 13 billion US dollars. In addition, SenseTime has also built a moat by recruiting a large number of top talents and formed a luxurious AI army.

On December 30, 2021, SenseTime successfully listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. However, the common problem with the company compared to its peers is that it does not make money. Not only does it not make money, but it is also a large loss making enterprise.

According to previous financial reports, from 2018 to 2023, SenseTime's net profit was -3.433 billion yuan, -4.968 billion yuan, -12.158 billion yuan, -1.777 billion yuan, -6.093 billion yuan, and -6.495 billion yuan, respectively. The total accumulated loss for these six years was 50.324 billion yuan.

In the first half of 2024, SenseTime achieved a revenue of 1.74 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 21%; The net loss decreased from 3.123 billion yuan in the same period last year to 2.457 billion yuan. Among them, generative AI has become the main source of revenue for SenseTime. In the first half of 2024, SenseTime's generative AI business reached 1.051 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 255.7%, contributing over 60.4% to total revenue.

As the leader of China's four AI dragons, SenseTime was once a "hot commodity" for capital in the financing process, and many star institutions have invested and supported it. According to statistics, between 2015 and June 2021 alone, SenseTime Technology has achieved 12 rounds of financing, with a total financing amount of 35 billion yuan.

As of October 24th, SenseTime Technology closed at HKD 1.59, a decrease of 4.22%, with a total market value of HKD 55.876 billion. Compared to the highest market value of nearly 350 billion Hong Kong dollars, this market value can be said to be a cut in the ankle.

It should be pointed out that SenseTime has a wide range of business scope and involves many fields, but has not yet explored an effective profit model. And the huge R&D investment further hinders enterprises from exploring and trial and error. The fierce competitive environment also makes it difficult for its business to quickly turn the tide.

03. SenseTime's layout in healthcare
In the medical field, SenseTime has also been low-key in its layout. According to the prospectus, SenseTime Technology has not yet established medical AI as a separate business segment, but belongs to the smart life business segment. As a leading enterprise in the field of computer vision, Shangtang has already had mature applications in smart cities, Internet entertainment, smart phones and other scenarios. After it was determined to enter the medical field in 2018, Shangtang quickly established its own R&D and product capabilities and formed a smart health team.

At present, SenseTime's medical business mainly revolves around its medical and health language model "Da Yi" and related smart medical platforms, as follows:

 Medical and Health Language Model "Big Doctor"
The medical and health big language model "Da Yi" is based on the billion parameter scale big language model "Discussion", and is trained using high-quality medical knowledge data with over 20 billion tokens. The data scope covers medical textbooks, medical guidelines, clinical pathways, drug libraries, disease libraries, physical examination reports, as well as a large number of real medical records, doctor-patient questions and conversations, ensuring the reliability and accuracy of the answers.

The medical and health language model "Da Yi" supports personalized features such as prompt engineering customization, long-term memory access, and medical knowledge base query and summary. The prompt engineering customization can guide the model to intelligently adjust the reply content according to the actual scene needs; Long term memory access can better meet the follow-up needs of patients with long-term illness; Querying and summarizing medical knowledge bases can help build exclusive knowledge bases to meet personalized needs.

At present, it has cooperated with multiple medical institutions such as the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Ruijin Hospital affiliated with Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, and Xinhua Hospital affiliated with Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine. For example, collaborating with the National Remote Medical Center of the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University to develop a large language model for drug consultation; Collaborate with Ruijin Hospital to optimize specialized decision-making support; Collaborate with Xinhua Hospital to empower patient service scenarios such as follow-up visits.

Smart healthcare platform
SenseCare intelligent diagnosis and treatment platform: The independently developed intelligent diagnosis and treatment platform has further improved its performance under the empowerment of medical multimodal basic model groups. The platform is equipped with more than 20 AI assisted diagnosis and treatment modules, which can provide full process AI assistance covering multiple parts of the body, multiple diseases, and multimodal data, providing doctors with one-stop intelligent image analysis. At present, it has been opened for application in more than ten clinical directions, including lungs, coronary arteries, head and neck vessels, liver, orthopedics, pathology, radiotherapy, etc., and intelligent assistance has been achieved for more clinical departments, such as the liver intelligent surgical planning system. This platform has been implemented and applied in multiple top tier tertiary hospitals.

SenseCare Smart Medical Cloud Platform: A full stack multimodal intelligent imaging comprehensive service platform that can provide various solutions including image data interconnection, mobile image reading, 5G+remote consultation, AI intelligent diagnosis and treatment, AI cloud image quality control, imaging research and teaching for the National Health Commission, regional medical consortia, medical institutions at all levels, third-party medical imaging centers, etc. For example, SenseTime has assisted Qingdao West Coast New Area in building an artificial intelligence medical service platform, improving the service level of grassroots medical institutions.

SenseCare intelligent medical research platform: driven by medical multimodal basic model group and big data technology, it can integrate patient clinical data, multimodal examination and testing data, bioinformatics data, etc., achieve multi-source heterogeneous data governance, cross modal feature fusion, and explore the value of accumulated data. Doctors can also use the intelligent data annotation function equipped on the platform to efficiently carry out multimodal data interpretation and semi-automatic intelligent annotation.

Source: http://qixieke.com/Font/index/detailPage.html?id=3229-19