- Amid the intensifying competition among major corporations in China for cloud computing, the prices of language models have been reduced.
- Many major corporations, including Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu, are offering discounts of up to 97%, with some even providing their services for free.
- The developers of the Chinese LLM focused on charging fees to businesses as a way to monetise investments in LLM.
The significant price reduction of language models used in AI chatbots in China is expected to threaten corporate earnings. Some companies have begun targeting the business sector, while others are focusing on individuals.
Competition heats up
In China, where tensions and competition with the United States are escalating in advanced fields, the AI boom is intensifying, not unlike in the United States. Chinese companies are venturing into AI chatbot development to rival OpenAI‘s ‘ChatGPT‘. Following the release of “ChatGPT” by OpenAI, Chinese companies have swiftly introduced their own AI chatbots.
Chinese search engine Baidu launched “UniBot“, which surpassed 200 million users in just 8 months since its launch in April last year. Apple is considering equipping UniBot in the iPhone 16, set to be released in the second half of this year in China.
Additionally, Alibaba has introduced “Tongyi Qwen“, and startup MoonshotAI has launched ‘Kimi’, further heating up the competition in the AI chatbot market.
Also read: What are the benefits of using AI chatbots？
Price reduction
Alibaba’s cloud announced a maximum price reduction of up to 97% for the Tongyi Qwen LLM product. Baidu announced that it will soon offer the Ernie Speed and Ernie Lite models to all business users for free. Bytedance announced last week that the main model price of Doubao LLM will be 99.3% cheaper than the industry average for business users.
Also read: How do we define a chatbot powered by conversational AI?
The price war in the Chinese cloud computing space is now threatening business profits by affecting large-scale language models that support these chatbots.
