
China Now Has the Most Valuable AI Startup in the World - HillaryBriss
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-09/sensetime-snags-alibaba-funding-at-a-record-3-billion-valuation
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jd20
"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.

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HillaryBriss
"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."

