Alibaba and Baidu, two of China’s main tech corporations, dramatically decreased costs on Tuesday for his or her large-language fashions (LLMs) utilized in generative AI merchandise, intensifying the continuing worth competitors within the nation’s cloud computing sector.
Alibaba’s cloud division introduced substantial worth cuts, slashing prices by as much as 97 p.c on varied Tongyi Qwen LLMs. For instance, the Qwen-Lengthy mannequin’s worth dropped to only 0.0005 yuan per 1,000 tokens, a big discount from the earlier fee of 0.02 yuan per 1,000 tokens.
Baidu shortly adopted swimsuit, declaring that its Ernie Velocity and Ernie Lite fashions can be accessible without charge for all enterprise customers, simply hours after Alibaba’s announcement.
The cloud computing market in China has seen a fierce worth battle over current months, with Alibaba and Tencent each decreasing costs for his or her cloud providers. AI chatbot providers, bolstered by investments in LLMs following the profitable launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022, have been a key gross sales driver for a lot of Chinese language cloud suppliers.
The worth struggle has now prolonged to the LLMs behind these chatbots, probably impacting revenue margins for these corporations. Beforehand, companies had been charged to make use of Baidu’s Ernie Lite and Ernie Velocity fashions, which had been launched in March.
Bytedance not too long ago joined the fray, saying final week that the first mannequin of its Doubao LLMs can be priced 99.3 p.c decrease than the business common for enterprise customers.
Chinese language LLM builders have primarily focused companies for monetizing their investments in these fashions, though some have additionally begun addressing particular person customers. For example, Chinese language startup Moonshot launched a tipping function that enables each companies and people to pay for prioritized entry to its chatbot providers.
Baidu was the primary in China to supply LLM merchandise to particular person customers, charging 59 yuan per 30 days for entry to its superior Ernie 4 mannequin.
(With inputs from Reuters)
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Printed: 21 Could 2024, 07:17 PM IST
