Chinese technology giant Alibaba announced that it will cut the prices of its large language models by up to 85% on Tuesday, in a move aimed at boosting artificial intelligence pricing and making it more competitive.
Details of the offer via the Alibaba Cloud platform
Alibaba’s cloud computing unit, known as Alibaba Cloud and located in Hangzhou, stated in a WeChat post that it will provide price cuts on its Qwen-VL vision-language model designed to ingest and understand text and images.
Alibaba stock movements
Alibaba’s shares saw little change following the announcement, closing up 0.5% on the final trading day of the year in Hong Kong. However, these cuts reflect the intensifying race among China’s tech giants to capture a larger share of the emerging artificial intelligence product market.
Major Chinese technology companies, including Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, JD.com, Huawei, and TikTok parent ByteDance, have rolled out their massive language models over the past 18 months, seeking to capitalize on the hype surrounding the technology.
Previous cuts to support adoption
This is not the first time Alibaba has announced price cuts to encourage enterprises to use its AI-backed products. In February, the company announced price cuts of up to 55% across a wide range of core cloud products. In a move that made waves in May, it slashed the prices of its AI-powered Qwen model by 97%, aiming to drive up demand and improve artificial intelligence pricing.
Importance of large language models
Massive language models, commonly abbreviated as LLMs, are known as artificial intelligence models trained on vast amounts of data to generate human-like responses when given prompts and instructions. These models form the foundation of today’s generative artificial intelligence systems, such as the popular ChatGPT chatbot from Microsoft-backed OpenAI.
Alibaba’s focus on the enterprise sector
In Alibaba’s case, the company’s focus is on channeling its large language model capabilities toward enterprise use rather than launching a consumer chatbot like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In May, the company indicated that its Qwen models are currently used by more than 90,000 enterprise users.
