Chinese tech giant Alibaba is lowering the price of its visual language AI model Qwen-VL by 85 per cent to 0.003 yuan per thousand input tokens.
The e-commerce firm’s cloud computing arm, Alibaba Cloud, announced the revised rates in a WeChat post on Tuesday, December 31.
Qwen-VL is an open-source, large vision-language model. It is designed to process both texts and images. Over 90,000 businesses have deployed Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen AI models, the company had said in May 2024.
This is the third time that Alibaba has reportedly slashed the prices of its AI services amid an intensifying race among China-based tech companies to capture more of the country’s AI market.
Instead of launching consumer-facing AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Alibaba has sought to cater to the enterprise segment with its rollout of LLMs.
In February 2024, the company reduced the prices of a wide range of its core cloud products by 55 per cent. Three months later, Alibaba reduced the prices of accessing its Qwen AI model by 97 per cent to boost demand.
In the past year, Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, and other major Chinese tech firms have rushed to capitalise on the AI hype and introduce their own foundational AI models.
Content retrieved from: https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/artificial-intelligence/alibaba-cuts-pricing-vision-language-ai-model-9756148/.
