Photo: Tang Xiao’ou, the departed founder of Chinese AI company SenseTime, delivers a speech to his employees. “Last year was tough for everyone…”
AI is now being used in China to create digital avatars of deceased loved ones, for as little as 20 yuan ($2.76).
This trend reflects China’s fast-growing AI industry and the demand for “digital humans”. According to an article in The Guardian, the market for walking, talking versions of dead relatives — and other fun but virtual people — is expected to hit nearly $1.7 billion next year. That’s a lot of digital humans, if we’re talking $2.76 a pop.
I assume, without any evidence whatsoever, that the virtual version of Tang Xiao’ou — founder of the successful AI company SenseTime — who spoke to his employees recently, cost a bit more than $2.76.
“Hello everyone, we meet again,” Tang told the employees. “Last year was tough for everyone, but I believe difficult things will eventually pass.”
The difficult things did, indeed, eventually pass for him, personally. He died in December. But his digital version was raised from the dead, and was able to encourage his 3,000 employees to look forward to a brighter future.
At the event, the new CEO of SenseTime, Xu Li, introduced SenseNova 5.0 Large Language Model. ( Xu Li is still alive, and unlike Tang Xiao’ou, was dressed rather casually.)
From the SenseTime website:
Since its debut in April 2023, the SenseNova Large Model is currently in its fifth iteration. SenseNova 5.0 has undergone over 10TB of token training, covering a large amount of synthetic data. It adopts a Mixture of Experts, enabling effective context window coverage of approximately 200,000 during inference….
In terms of linguistic and creative capabilities, the creative writing, reasoning, and summary abilities of SenseNova 5.0 have significantly improved. Given the same knowledge input, it provides better comprehension, summarization, and question and answers, providing strong support for vertical applications such as education and the content industries.
I assume, again without any evidence, that the strong support for education and the content industries (like daily news coverage?) produced by SenseNove 5.0 is delivered mainly in Chinese. I had a chance to study Chinese when I was in college, but I studied French instead. What a mistake.
SenseNova must have some pretty impressive creative capabilities, if it can bring a company CEO back from the dead. As far as I know, ChatGPT (our popular American AI application) can write an essay in the style of Mark Twain or Ernest Hemingway, but I don’t believe it can make them speak to 3,000 employees at a corporate event.
Around the same time that Tang Xiao’ou was encouraging SenseTime employees, millions of people across China were traveling to the graves of their ancestors to pay their respects during the nation’s annual tomb-sweeping celebration – the Qingming Festival — a traditional day to honor and maintain the graves of the dead. Similar to our Memorial Day celebration, I guess, but a month earlier? And probably, no little American flags.
At the rate things are going, these tomb-sweeping celebrations might be on the way out, if the ancestors continue to live inside our computers, or on the internet.
Which will be hard, presumably, on the broom manufacturers.
Virtual brooms? Maybe that could be a thing.
If they are priced less than $2.76.