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China Now Has the Most Valuable AI Startup in the World

• HillaryBriss 9y ago
  "And it’s a contributor to the world’s biggest system of surveillance: if you’ve ever been photographed with a Chinese-made phone or walked the streets of a Chinese city, chances are your face has been digitally crunched by SenseTime software built into more than 100 million mobile devices."
• jd20 9y ago
  "It’s developing a service code-named “Viper” to parse data from thousands of live camera feeds ... The ultimate goal is to juggle 100,000 feeds simultaneously." Technically, this sounds very ambitious. Assume a 24/7 video feed is several gigabytes a day, meaning at 100,000 streams they'd be processing several hundred terabytes a day. Furthermore, as a conservative estimate, assume face detection is run once per second, half the day (maybe they shut it off when nothing interesting is detected), that's over 40K frames / day to analyze. So 4B images / day total. AWS charges about $60k / 1M images with face detection only, that's $2.4M per day. I'm sure SenseTime's costs are lower than what AWS charges, but that's still some serious computing power. Their customers (presumably Chinese government) must have really well lined pockets to make this sustainable.