Alibaba Slashes Prices On LLMs By Up To 85% As China AI Rivalry Heats Up 12
Alibaba is cutting prices on its large language models by up to 85% to attract more enterprise users and strengthen its position in China's competitive AI market. CNBC reports: 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. [...] Major Chinese tech firms including Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, JD.com, 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. [...] In Alibaba's case, the company is focusing its LLM efforts on the enterprise segment rather than launching a consumer AI chatbot like OpenAI's ChatGPT. In May, the company said its Qwen models have been deployed by over 90,000 enterprise users.
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. [...] In Alibaba's case, the company is focusing its LLM efforts on the enterprise segment rather than launching a consumer AI chatbot like OpenAI's ChatGPT. In May, the company said its Qwen models have been deployed by over 90,000 enterprise users.
Discount? (Score:2)
Is 80% a good discount for LLMs? Let's ask gwehir, who has some strong, consistent thoughts about the value of LLMs.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, I assume you mean me, despite the spelling errors.
Simple: An LLM used for anything but somewhat better search and somewhat better crap is too expensive when you do not get paid for using it. In my case, I would require about $200/h.
No moat for AI Llm providers (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
There will be no free to use for something that is in great demand and creates use-based costs.
But OpenAI wanted to charge up to $2000 for their reasoning model and $200 for their advanced models. Guess who will need to lower API prices next or lose to Alibaba.
The current AI race benefits the customers. All companies except for OpenAI release open weights to keep OpenAI from getting a monopoly, the API providers provide fair prices and they try to improve on their models all the time.
Pound for pound (or param for param) (Score:4, Informative)
I haven't used Qwen-Plus, but it's amazing what even their instruct and code models can do at just 32 billion parameters.
https://qwenlm.github.io/blog/... [github.io]
2025 will be exciting for those with interest in running these models locally.
We no longer look to Open AI, which is pretty much the most Closed AI at this point. It's quite surprising to see China take charge in the open weight model space this quickly.
Qwen models surpass Meta's Llama models. Microsoft's Phi-4 is supposed to edge it, but has a track record of its real world performance not matching benchmarks in the previous iterations.
DeepSeek is open and cheap too, but they have not added much on the consumer desktop scale since their last lite model.
Still too expensive (Score:2, Informative)
In fact, "free" would be a very pricey.