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The World Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Shanghai in July 2023.
Aly’s song | Reuters
Alibaba is cutting prices on its large language models by up to 85%, the Chinese tech giant announced Tuesday.
The cloud computing division of Hangzhou-based e-commerce firm Alibaba Cloud said in a WeChat post that it is offering price cuts on its visual language model, Qwen-VL, which is designed to perceive and understand both texts and images.
Alibaba shares didn’t move much after the announcement, closing up 0.5% on the last trading day of the year in Hong Kong.
However, the price cuts demonstrate how the race is intensifying among China’s tech giants to win more business for their nascent artificial intelligence products.
Major Chinese technology companies, including Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, JD.comHuawei and TikTok parent company Bytedance have launched their own large language models over the past 18 months, seeking to capitalize on the buzz around 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 reductions of up to 55% on a wide range of core cloud products. Most recently, in May, the company reduced prices for its Qwen AI model. up to 97% in a bid to boost demand.
Large Language Models, or LLM for short, are artificial intelligence models that are trained with large amounts of data to generate human-like responses to user queries and prompts. They are the foundation of today’s generative AI systems, such as Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI’s popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT.
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 enterprise users.
