It’s often said that the Chinese are a hardworking and intelligent bunch, and there’s nothing artificial about it.

The global powerhouse plans to use facial recognition for mass surveillance, and is now staring their goal in the eye after the country’s top tech company, SenseTime, received a $600 million investment from Alibaba.

Let’s hear from The Telegraph:

The company is working on facial and object recognition technology that accurately can spot people using cameras, recently demonstrated on CCTV in Beijing.

Honda is using SenseTime for its driverless car research and development and it is also being used at shopping counters that allows customers to check-out using their faces.

I usually use my face to check out other faces, but oh well.

SenseTime absolutely smashed the AI funding record, surpassing Britain’s DeepMind, which was bought by Google for around 400 million pounds in 2014, before getting another $410 million in 2017 for good measure.

If you’re wondering how much SenseTime is currently worth, we’re talking about $4,5 billion, or R54 billion. Not too shabby.

Here’s a visual reference of what they’re up to, straight from The Matrix:

Of course, the US would involve itself somehow:

US university Massachusetts Institute for Technology is working with SenseTime for its research into “human and machine intelligence”. It is already working with 40 local governments in China which use its CCTV recognition, helping spot people of interest during festivals and in airports.

In fact, it already identifies details about people and vehicles in the street:

Nothing like living under constant supervision from Big Brother to put one’s mind at ease.

You can read more about SenseTime here.

[source:telegraph]