The World Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Shanghai in July 2023.
Aly Song | Reuters
Alibaba is slashing the prices of its major language models by up to 85%, the Chinese tech giant announced on Tuesday.
The cloud computing division of Hangzhou-based e-commerce company Alibaba Cloud said in a post on WeChat that it is offering a price cut for its visual language model, Qwen-VL, which is designed to perceive and understand both text and images.
Alibaba shares did not move much after the announcement, closing 0.5% higher on the last trading day of the year in Hong Kong.
Even so, the price cuts show that the race among China’s tech giants to win more work for their fledgling AI products is intensifying.
Major Chinese tech companies including Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, JD.comHuawei and TikTok parent company Bytedance have launched their own major language models over the past 18 months, looking to capitalize on the hype surrounding the technology.
This is not the first time Alibaba has announced price cuts to encourage companies to use its AI products. In February, the company announced price reduction of as much as 55% on a wide range of core cloud products. Recently, in May, the company reduced the prices of its Qwen AI model by as much as 97% in an attempt to increase demand.
Large language models, or LLM for short, are artificial intelligence models that are trained on massive amounts of data to generate human responses to user queries and instructions. They are the foundation of today’s generative AI systems, such as OpenAI’s popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT, a Microsoft-backed engine.
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 had been deployed by more than 90,000 business users.
