Alibaba Cloud is making a significant move in the AI market by slashing prices on its large language models (LLMs) by up to 85%. This drastic price cut is aimed at attracting more enterprise users and strengthening Alibaba's position in China's competitive AI market.¹
The discounted LLMs, including the visual language model Qwen-VL, are designed to perceive and understand both texts and images. Alibaba Cloud's pricing strategy is likely to heat up the competition among Chinese tech giants, including Tencent, Baidu, Huawei, and ByteDance, which have all launched their own LLMs in the past 18 months.²
By focusing on enterprise customers, Alibaba Cloud is taking a different approach than companies like OpenAI, which has gained popularity with its consumer-facing ChatGPT. Alibaba's Qwen models have already been deployed by over 90,000 enterprise customers, demonstrating the company's strong presence in the Chinese AI market.
