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Alibaba (9988) has further cut its stake in Chinese artificial intelligence firm SenseTime (0020) by selling 557 million shares for over HK$1 billion.

The e-commerce giant sold the shares at an average price of HK$1.82 apiece on Thursday, bringing its stake to 3.15 percent from 5.29 percent, according to a filing with the bourse yesterday.

As Alibaba's holding is now below 5 percent, it will not need to disclose any future changes in its shareholding.

Alibaba cashed in HK$267 million last month through two share sales in SenseTime.

SoftBank Group, the Japanese investment management firm, was also among SenseTime investors that kept paring its stakes. It offloaded 50 million shares in April for HK$138 million in the fourth share reduction it disclosed this year.

Shares of SenseTime have declined 15.8 percent so far this year.

This came as SenseTime recently unveiled upgrades to its AI models.

The company said its AI-powered chatbot, SenseChat, has overcome the input length restrictions of large language models and introduced different versions that can adapt to various application scenarios.

It also said its proprietary generative large model, SenseMirage 3.0, has upgraded its parameter count from one billion to seven billion since its initial release in April,

Firms such as Baidu (9888), Alibaba, and SenseTime have trotted out AI bots this year amid OpenAI's ChatGPT frenzy.

Alibaba cuts SenseTime stake to below 5pc