Alibaba Slashes Prices On LLMs By Up To 85% As China AI Rivalry Heats Up

Alibaba is cutting prices on its large language models by up to 85% to attract more enterprise users and strengthen its position in China's competitive AI market. CNBC reports: The Hangzhou-based e-commerce firm's cloud computing division, Alibaba Cloud, said in a WeChat post that it's offering the price cuts on its visual language model, Qwen-VL, which is designed to perceive and understand both texts and images. Major Chinese tech firms including Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, JD.com, Huawei and TikTok parent company Bytedance have all launched their own large language models over the past 18 months, looking to capitalize on the hype around the technology.

It's not the first time Alibaba has announced price cuts to incentivize businesses to use its AI products. In February, the company announced price reductions of as much as 55% on a wide range of core cloud products. More recently, in May, the company reduced prices on its Qwen AI model by as much as 97% in a bid to boost demand. In Alibaba's case, the company is focusing its LLM efforts on the enterprise segment rather than launching a consumer AI chatbot like OpenAI's ChatGPT. In May, the company said its Qwen models have been deployed by over 90,000 enterprise users.

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