SenseTime Co-Founder Lin Dahua: There is a Gap Between Us and OpenAI, But Our Costs Are Only One-Tenth of Theirs

According to Perceiving Beyond monitoring, SenseTime co-founder and Chief Scientist Lin Dahua admitted in an interview with CNBC that the company's latest model, SenseNova U1, still lags behind OpenAI's GPT Image 2 and Google's Gemini Nano Banana in terms of generative capabilities. However, the generative cost of SenseNova U1 is only one-tenth of ChatGPT Images 2.0. Lin Dahua's strategy was quoted as saying, "Many scenarios do not require the top-tier model; sufficient is enough."

SenseNova U1 is a native multimodal model for unified understanding and generation, based on the in-house NEO-unify architecture. It integrates language and vision processing into a single system, eliminating the conversion steps between different modalities to improve speed and efficiency. Drawing inspiration from DeepSeek, which focuses on building high-performance models under limited funds and computing power, SenseTime has positioned low cost as its core competitive advantage. Lin Dahua revealed that ByteDance's video model Seedance had posed competitive pressure, prompting SenseTime to integrate some of Seedance's capabilities into its own short video tool, Seko.

Financially, SenseTime narrowed its net loss by 58.6% in 2025, with EBITDA turning positive for the first time in the second half of the year, a first since its 2021 IPO. JF Wealth highlighted in an April 28 report the fourfold dilemma faced by pure-play model companies: low customer loyalty, limited differentiation, crowded race tracks, and high training costs. UBP Senior Stock Advisor Vey-Sern Ling remarked that platform companies like Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance could subsidize AI development with cash flows from their core businesses, while standalone AI companies continue to incur losses. Faced with U.S. sanctions, SenseTime has shifted its overseas focus to Southeast Asia, North Asia, the Middle East, and Brazil.