World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai in July 2023
Aly's song | Reuters
Alibaba is cutting prices of its large language models by up to 85%, the Chinese tech giant announced on Tuesday.
The cloud computing arm of Hangzhou-based e-commerce company Alibaba Cloud said in a WeChat post that it is offering price cuts for its Qwen-VL visual language model, which is designed to perceive and understand both text and images.
Alibaba shares were little changed after the announcement, closing 0.5% higher on the last trading day of the year in Hong Kong.
Still, the price cuts show how the race is intensifying among China's tech giants to win more customers for their nascent artificial intelligence products.
China's largest technology companies, including Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, JD.comHuawei and TikTok's parent company, Bytedance, have launched their own large language models over the past 18 months, looking to capitalize on the buzz around the technology.
This isn't the first time Alibaba has announced price cuts to encourage companies to use its AI products. In February, the company announced price cuts of up to 55% in a wide range of core cloud products. Most recently, in May, the company lowered the prices of its Qwen AI model by as much as 97% to increase demand.
Large language models, or LLM, are artificial intelligence models trained on massive amounts of data to generate human responses to user queries and suggestions. They form the basis of today's generative artificial intelligence systems, such as the popular AI chatbot backed by Microsoft, ChatGPT, startup OpenAI.
In Alibaba's case, the company is focusing its LLM efforts on the enterprise segment, rather than launching a consumer AI chatbot like ChatGPT OpenAI. In May, the company reported that its Qwen models had been deployed by more than 90,000 enterprise users.