Alibaba announced Tuesday that they would be reducing the prices of their large language models by up to 85%.
Alibaba Cloud, a cloud computing division based in Hangzhou, China announced discounts on the Qwen VL model of visual language. This system can read and understand both text and images.
Alibaba shares closed 0.5% lower in Hong Kong on December 31, 2018.
China’s tech giants have lowered prices to attract more customers for artificial intelligence products.
In recent months, Chinese tech giants such as Alibaba, Tencent Baidu JD.com Huawei, and TikTok parent company Bytedance have all launched large-language versions of their apps, in an attempt to capitalize on the hype around the technology.
Alibaba was not the first to offer price reductions in order to encourage companies to adopt AI. Alibaba reduced the price of its Qwen AI models by as much as 97% to boost demand.
Large language models, or LLMs for short, are AI models that use vast amounts of data in order to produce humanlike responses when users ask questions. Today’s generative AI is built on these models, including Microsoft’s ChatGPT AI Chatbot.
Alibaba announced in May that more than 90,000 enterprises had used its Qwen models.
