Alibaba Cloud announces aggressive LLM price cuts in bid to dominate China’s AI market

Alibaba Cloud It said on Tuesday it would cut access prices for state-of-the-art large-scale language models by up to 85% in an effort to drum up more interest from Chinese companies.

The move was announced via WeChat and was first reported by South China Morning Post. According to the report, Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen-VL-Max model is currently priced at just 0.003 yuan ($0.00041) per thousand tokens. Qwen-VL-Max is a visual reasoning model designed to perceive and understand text- and image-based input, and the new pricing is significantly lower than that of rival models from the likes of ByteDance Ltd.

Alibaba Cloud is the cloud computing arm of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. aggressive race China’s largest technology companies are teaming up to win more business for their emerging artificial intelligence products.

Alibaba Cloud’s competitors in China’s artificial intelligence market include Tencent, Baidu, JD.com, Huawei Technologies Co. and ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company), among others. Over the past 18 months, these companies have launched competing LL.M. programs aimed at capitalizing on the hype surrounding generative artificial intelligence technology.

LLMs are artificial intelligence models trained on large amounts of data to produce human-like responses to user queries and prompts. They are the basis for various generative AI chatbots (such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT) as well as next-generation search engines (such as Perplexity AI) and image generators (such as DALL-E).

Alibaba is focusing on Chinese companies that are as interested in the productivity-boosting potential of generative artificial intelligence as their U.S. counterparts. In May this year, Alibaba Cloud said that more than 90,000 companies across the country had downloaded its Qwen model.

However, the company faces stiff competition. Last year, Chinese generative AI developers launched more than 250 new LL.M. programs for public use. In addition to the largest tech companies, the country is also home to many hot new startups, such as Deep search,recent Announcing the launch of DeepSeek-V3 LL.M. With 671 billion parameters, it is one of the most powerful open source models.

Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen models include Qwen-VL, Qwen-VL-Chat, Qwen-VL-Max, Qwen2-VL, and experimental QVQ-72B-Preview. With its state-of-the-art performance, Qwen2-VL-Max outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4V and Google’s Gemini Ultra on benchmarks such as DocVQA and MathVista.

The Chinese company’s strategy of slashing prices to win more business is not new. In February, it announced price cuts of up to 55% on multiple core cloud computing services, followed by a cost reduction of up to 97% on its original Qwen-VL model in May.

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