SenseTime co-founder Lin Dahua: There is a gap with OpenAI, but our costs are only one-tenth of theirs.

According to Beating Monitoring, SenseTime’s co-founder and chief scientist, Lin Dahua, admitted in a CNBC interview that the company’s latest model, SenseNova U1, still falls short of OpenAI’s GPT Image 2 and Google’s Gemini Nano Banana in terms of image generation capabilities. However, the cost of generating images is only one-tenth of ChatGPT Images 2.0. Lin Dahua’s exact strategy statement is: “Many scenarios don’t need the most advanced models—good enough is enough.”

SenseNova U1 is a native multimodal model for unified understanding and generation. Based on the self-developed NEO-unify architecture, it integrates language and vision processing into a single system, eliminating the need for conversion steps between different modalities and thereby improving speed and efficiency. SenseTime has drawn on DeepSeek’s approach—developing high-performance models under conditions where funding and computing resources are limited—and positions low cost as its core competitive advantage. Lin Dahua revealed that ByteDance’s video model, Seedance, once created competitive pressure. SenseTime has since integrated some of Seedance’s capabilities into its own short-video tool, Seko.

On the financial side, SenseTime’s net loss in 2025 narrowed by 58.6%, and its EBITDA turned positive for the first time in the second half of the year—its first such milestone since going public in 2021. In a research report dated April 28, Jefferies pointed out that pure-model companies face four major dilemmas: low customer loyalty, limited differentiation, an overcrowded track, and high training costs. UBP senior equity advisor Vey-Sern Ling also said that platform companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance can subsidize AI development with cash flow from their core businesses, while independent AI companies continue to incur losses. In response to U.S. sanctions, SenseTime has shifted its overseas focus to Southeast Asia, North Asia, the Middle East, and Brazil.