Alibaba (NYSE:BABA) announced Tuesday it is cutting prices on its large language models by up to 85%.
The Hangzhou-based e-commerce firm’s cloud computing division, Alibaba Cloud, said in a WeChat post that it’s offering the price cuts on its visual language model, Qwen-VL, which is designed to perceive and understand both texts and images.
Nevertheless, the price cuts demonstrate how the race among China’s technology giants to win more business for their nascent artificial intelligence products is intensifying.
Major Chinese tech firms including Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), JD.com (NASDAQ:JD), Huawei and TikTok parent company Bytedance have all launched their own large language models over the past 18 months, looking to capitalize on the hype around the technology.
It’s not the first time Alibaba has announced price cuts to incentivize businesses to use its AI products. In February, the company announced price reductions of as much as 55% on a wide range of core cloud products. More recently, in May, the company reduced prices on its Qwen AI model by as much as 97% in a bid to boost demand.
Shares of Alibaba didn’t move much on the announcement, closing 0.5% higher on the final trading day of the year in Hong Kong. BABA shares opened higher by 42 cents in New York to $84.56
