Alibaba, a Chinese tech behemoth, said Tuesday that it is reducing the cost of its massive language models by as much as 85%.
Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing branch of the Hangzhou-based e-commerce company, announced on WeChat that it is lowering the cost of its visual language model, Qwen-VL, which is intended to recognise and comprehend both text and images.
Alibaba’s stock closed 0.5% higher on Hong Kong’s last trading day of the year, indicating little movement in response to the announcement.
However, the price reductions show how China’s tech behemoths are strengthening their competition to gain more customers for their emerging AI goods.
Over the past 18 months, major Chinese tech companies including Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, JD.com, Huawei, and Bytedance, the parent company of TikTok, have all introduced their own big language models in an attempt to take advantage of the excitement surrounding the technology.
Alibaba has already announced price reductions to encourage companies to use its AI solutions. The business revealed price cuts of up to 55% on a variety of essential cloud goods in February. In an effort to increase demand, the company more recently lowered the price of its Qwen AI model by up to 97% in May.
AI models known as large language models, or LLMs for short, are trained on enormous amounts of data to provide responses to user prompts and enquiries that resemble those of a human. They serve as the foundation for modern generative AI systems, such as ChatGPT, the well-known AI chatbot from Microsoft-backed firm OpenAI.
Instead of introducing a consumer AI chatbot like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Alibaba is concentrating its LLM efforts on the commercial market. The company reported in May that more than 90,000 enterprise users have used its Qwen models.
