- Tang Xiao’ou, the billionaire founding father of China’s AI large SenseTime, died Friday.
- The corporate introduced he’d succumbed to undisclosed “well being points.”
- He died simply weeks after the agency was accused of artificially inflating its income.
Tang Xiao’ou, the billionaire founding father of China’s AI large SenseTime, died Friday of undisclosed “well being points,” in accordance with a press release launched by the partly state-owned firm.
“It’s with nice sorrow that we announce the passing of Professor Tang Xiao’ou, our beloved founder, a famend synthetic intelligence (AI) scientist, director of Pujiang Lab, director of Shanghai AI Lab, and Professor of The Chinese language College of Hong Kong,” learn a press release from SenseTime launched early Sunday in China. “Professor Tang handed away on account of well being points on December 15, 2023, at 11:45 p.m.”
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The obituary posted by the corporate didn’t specify what kind of well being points Tang died of or if his sickness had been beforehand identified.
The controversial Chinese language AI firm, based in 2014, was as soon as the world’s most precious AI startup due partly to its direct connections and funding from the Chinese language authorities. The corporate develops applied sciences, together with facial recognition, object detection, and video and picture evaluation utilizing AI.
Representatives for SenseTime didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark from Enterprise Insider.
Tang’s demise comes simply weeks after a US-based short-seller, Grizzly Analysis, accused the Chinese language AI agency of artificially inflating its income, suggesting that SenseTime engaged in “extremely questionable income round-tripping schemes” through which the corporate instantly or not directly supplied funds to clients that had been used to buy items from SenseTime that won’t have ever been delivered.
“We imagine that SenseTime’s core facial recognition enterprise has develop into notoriously unprofitable on account of intense competitors and the truth that the Chinese language authorities merely doesn’t make a follow of awarding extremely worthwhile contracts to majority foreign-owned companies,” Grizzly Analysis mentioned in its report launched in late November.
Although the corporate argued in a submitting to the Hong Kong Inventory Change that the report was “with out benefit and accommodates unfounded allegations and deceptive conclusions and interpretations,” SenseTime’s inventory was nonetheless deeply impacted by the accusations, falling practically 10% within the wake of the information, bringing its whole losses to greater than 40% to this point this 12 months — and greater than 80% since its IPO, Forbes reported.
On the time of his demise, Tang had a internet value of $1.1 billion, made up solely of the worth of his shares in SenseTime, per Forbes.
