China is winning the war for stronger, more accessible AI

The best AI is being made in China, for everyone. More people and more companies will be able to use it. Compare this to the US, where ChatGPT Pro is costing around $200 per month — pushing AI to the rich

Alibaba announced this Tuesday (31) price cuts on its large language models (LLMs) of up to 85%.

The cloud computing division of Chinese technology giant Alibaba Cloud, based in Hangzhou, said in a WeChat post that it is offering price reductions on the Qwen-VL visual language model, designed to interpret and understand text and images.

Alibaba shares did not show much change after the announcement, ending the last trading day of the year in Hong Kong with an increase of 0.5%.

Despite this, the price cuts highlight how the fight among China’s technology giants to win more business with their emerging artificial intelligence products is intensifying.

Major Chinese technology companies, including Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, JD.com, Huawei and TikTok parent Bytedance, have launched their own large language models over the past 18 months, seeking to capitalize on the excitement around the technology.

This is not the first time that Alibaba has announced price cuts to encourage the use of its AI products. In February, the company reduced prices on a wide range of core cloud computing products by up to 55%. More recently, in May, the company announced price reductions of up to 97% for its Qwen AI model in an attempt to stimulate demand.

Large language models, known as LLMs, are trained with vast amounts of data to generate human-like responses to user queries and commands. They are the foundation of today’s generative AI systems, such as the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT from Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI.

In Alibaba’s case, the company is focusing its efforts on LLMs in the enterprise segment rather than launching a consumer-facing AI chatbot like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In May, the company reported that its Qwen models have already been deployed by more than 90,000 enterprise users.

With information from CNBC*