SenseTime’s Xu Li Delivers Inspiring New Year’s Eve Speech: Embracing AI to Truly Popularize the “Future”

On the evening of December 31, 2025, the “2025 CCTV Finance New Year’s Eve” was officially launched. Leading entrepreneurs from six major fields, including advanced manufacturing, modern agriculture, new energy, artificial intelligence, and humanoid robots, gathered to look forward to “Next Stop, 2026”.

Xu Li, Chairman and CEO of SenseTime, was invited to deliver a New Year’s speech. Together with distinguished guests, such as Dong Mingzhu of Gree Electric, Feng Xingya of GAC Group, Zhong Baoshen of LONGi Green Energy, Qin Yinglin of Muyuan Group, and Wang He of Galaxy Universal, he welcomed the arrival of 2026 in front of a live audience and viewers at home.

AI Won’t Replace You; It Will Amplify You

Under the theme “Walking with AI”, Xu Li shared his insights on the era of AI 2.0. The next step for AI is not just about being faster and stronger, but becoming a long-term “companion” to people and society, he said. The true significance is not in the capability leap itself, but in the changing relationship between humans and AI.

Once habits are formed, they are hard to change, said Xu Li. It may be difficult for someone accustomed to a familiar keyboard to accept a brand-new layout, he explained. But those encountering the new layout for the first time are more likely to explore new ways of using it. Therefore, the role of education should not be to correct existing habits but to develop new learning methods more suited to the times, fostering natural growth from the start.

As AI becomes a universal capability, the focus of learning will shift from memorizing facts to understanding what questions to ask, what tools to use, and how to turn ideas into reality step by step.

During his speech, Xu Li shared two stories from real learning scenarios. In a Chinese language class, a teacher used AI to transform students’ essays into videos, making the children feel that their expressions were seen, responded to, and taken seriously. At a developer conference, a 10-year-old child became the youngest developer, using AI to complete a mini-game in minutes, an accomplishment that would have taken days without this technology.

What truly matters is not just the improvement of efficiency, but the expansion of possibilities. What once may have seemed “impossible” is now worth trying. AI is not replacing creation; instead, it is lowering the threshold for creation, making complex tasks more approachable and achievable, he said.

Xu Li explained that AI is becoming a bridge, connecting more people with ideas and creativity who were previously hindered because of a lack of tools. “Humans drive the evolution of AI, and in turn, AI expands the boundaries of human capabilities,” he said.

This is the essence of AI’s true popularity in his eyes. When children develop “native AI habits” and naturally collaborate and co-create with machines, AI will truly become popular and integrate into society. Everyone willing to embrace, learn, and use AI is quietly shaping this new era. (The full speech is attached below.)

When AI Talks to “Your Past Self”

Xu Li brought this philosophy of “companionship” to the New Year’s Eve scene by showcasing a special video generated using SenseTime’s latest SekoTalk technology, featuring five guests engaging in a dialogue across time and space with their “past selves”. This allowed them to reinterpret time, memory, and growth collaboratively. SekoTalk is also the industry’s first video generation solution that supports lip-sync for more than two participants.

At the end of the roundtable discussion, in a light-hearted gift exchange, Feng Xingya, Chairman of GAC Group, drew a special gift prepared by SenseTime—the Yuanluobo 4-in-1 Chess Robot.

This mass-produced home AI robotic arm can play chess and engage in real-time conversations. Xu Li expressed the hope that this gift would enhance family life by providing more relaxed and interesting companionship experiences.

In moments like these, AI steps off the stage and screen to become a tangible part of everyday life.

Full text of Xu Li’s speech at the 2025 CCTV Finance New Year’s Eve

Distinguished guests and friends, hello. My name is Xu Li, from SenseTime.

SenseTime was one of China’s earliest artificial intelligence companies. In the Smart Cities sector, SenseTime’s computer vision technology has ranked first in industry market share for nine consecutive years. Today, our technical services cover more than 200 cities, supporting hundreds of millions of urban perceptions and decisions every day. Among about 300 prefecture-level cities nationwide, one out of every two runs SenseTime’s urban algorithms.

Over the past decade, SenseTime’s AI algorithms have covered more than four billion devices, with 500 million new smartphones added in 2025 alone. Many smart experiences and applications you take for granted are actually silently working for you, powered by SenseTime’s AI operating in the background.

Many people have asked me what SenseTime most wants to achieve in this new wave of AI.

Looking back at over 10 years of technological iteration, I have come to a clearer understanding. For AI to become a symbol of this era, it requires not only technological breakthroughs but also the cognitive upgrading of the whole society, the cultivation of new usage habits, and the gradual improvement of the entire industrial ecosystem. This is the crucial question we are exploring: how to advance AI a step further to make it naturally integrate from being perceived to truly becoming part of everyday life.

Today, I want to share a fundamental but critical field—Artificial Intelligence + Education. Why is this so important?

A few months ago, I visited our office in Saudi Arabia, where one of our core businesses is Artificial Intelligence + Education. This photo was taken of us in Saudi Arabia in 2022. To be honest, I can’t read a single word in this photo except our own logo, but I was deeply touched to see an artificial intelligence education product originating from China, being seen, used, and discussed by so many people in a country with a completely different language and culture. If we truly hope to integrate artificial intelligence into people’s daily lives, the first step may not be using it immediately, but rather fostering an understanding of this technology—what it can accomplish, its limitations, and more importantly, how it can be used as a tool to ignite a passion for learning.

Today, large models have condensed the average knowledge of humanity. The essence of learning is no longer just memorizing facts, but mastering new ways of thinking and cultivating new usage habits, because once habits are formed, they are hard to change.

Since 2017, SenseTime has collaborated with many frontline teachers to promote AI education in the classroom. To date, the SenseTime AI Education team has engaged with more than 20 provincial-level administrative regions, covering over 3,200 schools and serving more than 400,000 teachers and students. In Saudi Arabia, we have cooperated deeply with the Ministry of Education to train 2,200 teachers, benefiting over 30,000 students. This generation will be the first to truly walk alongside artificial intelligence in the future.

Recently, we launched the Seko 2.0 video generation agent. A Chinese teacher in a Shanxi classroom used Seko to convert students’ essays into engaging video presentations and played them for the whole class. For many children, this was the first time that their words could be seen so intuitively. AI did not write the essays for them; instead, it stood beside them, making their emotions and thoughts that were originally difficult to express more accessible and understandable.

At a developer conference in Shanghai this year, the youngest developer in the audience was a 10-year-old boy. With the help of SenseTime’s Little Raccoon product, he created a Nezha-themed Gomoku mini-game in just a few minutes. In this case, AI did not replace creation; instead, it lowered the threshold for creation, making complex things attemptable, modifiable, and achievable. AI is becoming a bridge, connecting more people with ideas and creativity who were once hindered by a lack of professional skills. This is a brand-new companion relationship.

Humans are driving the evolution of AI, and AI, in turn, is expanding the boundaries of human capabilities. This reciprocal relationship is at the core of what we envision in the AI era.

We often reference a quote by Kevin Kelly in his book Out of Control: “The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.” When children develop native AI habits and can naturally collaborate with machines, that is when AI will truly achieve popularity and become integrated into society.

AI is your companion, and you, in turn, are a companion to AI. This friend you have never met will grow up with us, and everyone willing to embrace it will quietly help shape this era.

I hope that in 2026, whatever is in your heart will come to fruition.

Thank you all!