Skip to Content
Artificial intelligence

China’s facial-recognition startups can probably pick you out of a crowd

January 25, 2018

Chinese facial-recognition companies are getting very, very good at what they do.

Locking 'em up: A police department in China went from capturing a handful of suspects a year with officers watching CCTV cameras to capturing 69 suspects in one month after deploying software made by the firm SenseTime.

Big data: Companies in China have access to a government trove of video surveillance footage that’s unmatched on the planet. Xu Li, CEO of SenseTime, told the Financial Times that his firm has processed 500 million faces and has a single client that needed 300 million faces verified.

But: China is leading the way in facial-recognition software and trying to become an AI powerhouse. But foreign governments won’t like the idea of their citizens’ data living on Chinese servers. Besides, American companies are hard at work on their own surveillance technology.

Deep Dive

Artificial intelligence

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

Google DeepMind’s new generative model makes Super Mario–like games from scratch

Genie learns how to control games by watching hours and hours of video. It could help train next-gen robots too.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.