SenseTime, a Chinese AI company best known for its facial recognition technology, released a new open source model on Tuesday that it claims can both generate and interpret images far faster than top models developed by US competitors. SenseNova U1 could help the company reclaim lost ground after it slipped from its place among the leading players in China’s AI development race.

The model’s secret sauce is its ability to “read” images without translating them to text first, speeding up the process and reducing the amount of computing power required. “The model’s entire reasoning process is no longer limited to text.…