As an early layout of large computing power and large model AI enterprise in China, Sense Time (Chinese:商汤科技) is preparing before the coming of the AIGC era and trying to seize the first opportunity.
Sense Time, a leading artificial intelligence software company, released its 2022 financial results on March 28. The financial report shows that in 2022, Sense Time will have revenue of CNY3.8 billion and gross profit of CNY2.54 billion.
In 2022, Sense Time pushed forward the industrial application expansion of AI technology and business structure transformation, with revenue from the smart life business segment increasing by 130%, accounting for 25.1% of revenue, and revenue from the smart car business segment increasing by 58.9% year on year, accounting for 7.7% of revenue. This is a significant increase from 9% and 4% in 2021.
In 2022, the epidemic had a significant impact on various industries, and Sense Time will also promote the expansion of industry applications of AI technology and business structure transformation.
Among them, Sense Time's smart life business achieved revenue of CNY 955 million in 2022, up 129.9% year on year, with four products of AI-generated content (AIGC), AI sensors, AIISP chips and smart medical achieving commercial breakthroughs; the smart automotive business achieved revenue of CNY 293 million, up 58.9% year on year. The smart business achieved revenue of CNY1.464 billion, down to 38.4% of revenue, with SenseCore's external business expansion and AI-as-a-Service (AIaaS) revenue growth; the smart city business achieved revenue of CNY1.096 billion, down to 28.8% of revenue.
"In 2022, the field of artificial general intelligence (AGI) is making significant progress, driven by big computing power and big models. Sense Time is focused on the development of mega models and is actively investing in building an AI high-performance computing infrastructure. We look to the future with AGI as our core growth strategy to achieve significant breakthroughs in the coming years. Artificial intelligence is a promising field, and Sense Time will continue to invest in the cutting-edge R&D and commercialization process towards general AI," said Dr. Xu Li, Executive Chairman and CEO of Sense Time's Board of Directors.
In 2022, Sense Time made significant progress in seven core technology areas: Large Device and High-Performance Computing, Computer Vision, AI Generated Content (AIGC), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Speech Recognition and Synthesis, Reinforcement Learning and Decision Intelligence, and AI Chips and Hardware Acceleration.
As of December 31, 2022, Sense Time had 3,466 R&D employees, representing 68% of its workforce. Sense Time's R&D investment in 2022 was CNY3.796 billion, an increase of 24% year on year. So far in 2018, Sense Time's cumulative R&D investment reached CNY12.847 billion.
Sense Time has set artificial general intelligence (AGI) as its core development strategy in 2023, with the aim of achieving major breakthroughs in AGI technology in the coming years, and will deepen and explore the key areas of large-scale computing power, large-scale multimodal models, and the development of AI-specific hardware and chips to build the core capabilities of AGI.