Alibaba Cloud Slashes AI Model Prices by 85% in Fierce Chinese Market Competition

Alibaba Cloud Joins Forces With Ex-Google Exec's Unicorn To Boost AI Models - Alibaba Gr Hldgs (NYSE:BABA)

Alibaba Cloud offers steep AI model discounts amid domestic price wars. Chinese e-commerce juggernaut Alibaba Group Holding's BABA cloud unit is partnering with Beijing-based startup 01.AI to develop artificial intelligence (AI) models. Alibaba Cloud aims to set up an industrial large model laboratory to create large model solutions for business clients, according to South China Morning Post. 01.AI, founded in May 2023 by former Alphabet Inc GOOG GOOGL Google China head Lee Kai-fu, reached a valuation of $1 billion in just six months. Also Read: Sam Altman's OpenAI Plans Major Revamp Of Corporate Structure Alibaba Cloud's partnership coincided with price wars in the domestic market, which prompted companies to offer further discounts or collaborate with former rivals. Also this week, Alibaba Cloud agreed to offer up to 85% discounts for its visual reasoning AI model, marking its third discount for the year. In December, TikTok parent ByteDance agreed to offer a discount on its visual model that was 85% below the industry average. Meanwhile, Alibaba split up its AI team, with one focusing on developing applications for the AI chatbot Tongyi Qianwen and the other in charge of the underlying LLM. Wedbush's Dan Ives expects the U.S. Big Techs to incur $1 trillion on AI capital expenditure. Alibaba Group Holding stock surged over 11% in the last 12 months. The company reported second-quarter 2024 revenue growth of 5% to $33.70 billion, beating the consensus estimate of $33.47 billion. Adjusted earnings per ADS of $2.15 missed the analyst estimate of $2.26. Cloud Intelligence Group revenue grew by 7% to $4.22 billion, driven by the double-digit revenue growth of public cloud products, including AI-related products. Investors can gain exposure to Alibaba through Invesco Golden Dragon China ETF PGJ and ProShares Online Retail ETF ONLN. Price Action: Alibaba stock is up 0.11% at $85.05 at the last check Friday. Also Read: Chinese Stocks Drop As Manufacturing Growth Slows And Geopolitical Tensions Hit Image: Shutterstock Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Alibaba Leverages Scale and Deep Pockets to Slash AI LLM Prices To Gain Market Share - Alibaba Gr Hldgs (NYSE:BABA)

Qwen-VL interprets text and images; Alibaba focuses on enterprise AI rather than consumer chatbots like ChatGPT. Alibaba Group Holding BABA slashed its large language model prices by up to 85%, exhibiting intense domestic rivalry in the AI space. Chinese companies remain engaged in a price war to win market share, prompting Alibaba Cloud to initiate discounts on its visual language model, Qwen-VL, CNBC cites from Alibaba's WeChat post on Tuesday. In February, the Chinese e-commerce juggernaut announced up to 55% discounts on its core cloud products. Also Read: Trump Administration to Challenge Social Media Censorship, Setting Stage for Conflict with EU Regulations Jack Ma's co-founded company slashed its Qwen AI model prices by up to 97% in May. Qwen-VL can interpret both texts and images. Chinese tech firms, including Alibaba, Tencent Holdings TCEHY, Baidu Inc BIDU, and JD.com Inc JD, launched their large language models. In the third quarter, Chinese companies spent 500 million yuan ($70.2 million) on promotional campaigns for AI applications. Alibaba committed 200 million yuan to promote the Quark cloud storage and search platform. Alibaba remains focused on LLM efforts in the enterprise segment rather than launching a consumer AI chatbot like OpenAI's ChatGPT. Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group revenue grew by 7% to $4.22 billion in the second quarter. Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu disbursed $7 billion on AI infrastructure and processors in the first half of 2024. Meanwhile, Wedbush's Dan Ives expects the U.S. Big Techs, including Meta Platforms Inc META, Microsoft Corp MSFT, and Amazon.Com Inc AMZN, to spend $1 trillion on AI capital expenditure. Alibaba Group Holding stock surged over 13% in the last 12 months. Investors can gain exposure to the stock through Invesco Golden Dragon China ETF PGJ and First Trust Nasdaq Artificial Intelligence and Robotics ETF ROBT. Price Action: BABA stock traded lower by 1.04% at $83.91 premarket at the last check on Thursday. Also Read: Xiaomi Expands EV Charging Options, Partners with NIO, XPeng, and Li Auto for Greater Network Access Photo by Ascannio via Shutterstock BABAAlibaba Group Holding Ltd$83.90-1.05%Overview Rating:Speculative50%Technicals Analysis660100Financials Analysis400100WatchlistOverviewAMZNAmazon.com Inc$222.441.39%BIDUBaidu Inc$83.26-1.25%JDJD.com Inc$34.13-1.56%METAMeta Platforms Inc$592.501.19%MSFTMicrosoft Corp$427.551.44%PGJInvesco Golden Dragon China ETF$26.05-0.42%ROBTFirst Trust Nasdaq Artificial Intelligence and Robotics ETF$45.150.24%TCEHYTencent Holdings Ltd$53.250.13%Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Alibaba Plans Major Discounts on AI Large Language Models | PYMNTS.com

Chinese tech giant Alibaba is reportedly slashing prices on its AI large language models. Those markdowns are as high as 85%, CNBC reported Tuesday (Dec. 31), citing a WeChat post from the company's cloud computing unit. The cuts involve Alibaba's visual language model, Qwen-VL, created to perceive and understand both texts and images. The report notes that the discounts illustrate the intensifying race among Chinese tech companies to capture new business for their artificial intelligence (AI) products. In addition to Alibaba, tech giants like Tencent, Baidu, JD.com, Huawei and ByteDance have all introduced their own large language models (LLMs), AI models trained on massive amounts of data in an effort to generate human-like replies. But unlike popular consumer AI models like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Alibaba is focusing its LLM operations on enterprises, the report adds. 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, Alibaba announced its Qwen models have been deployed by more than 90,000 enterprise customers. As PYMNTS wrote earlier this year, Chinese companies' markdowns on AI models have reshaped the global artificial intelligence landscape. "As prices plummet, businesses worldwide could gain unprecedented access to advanced AI tools, potentially revolutionizing commerce across industries," that report said. Experts, PYMNTS added, argue the shift could democratize AI capabilities, letting smaller startups compete with massive tech companies, and allowing traditional businesses to overhaul their operations with state-of-the-art technology. "We will see significantly more competitiveness since much VC investment is going towards 'picks-and-shovels' AI technologies, and we should see more global pricing wars, which will be good," Nick Rioux, co-founder and CTO of AI company Labviva, told PYMNTS. "When market forces impact technology innovation, we can create more use cases for a broader, more diverse set of applications. This is good and relatively unexpected when looking at how China has managed technological governance in the past." PYMNTS also explored AI efforts by Alibaba and other tech firms in a report Tuesday on the transformative year the technology has just experienced. "The drive for more capable systems continues into 2025," that report said. "Competition among tech giants has accelerated development, pushing boundaries in machine reasoning and practical applications. The next wave of innovation may determine which approaches -- and which companies -- shape the future of this technology."

Alibaba Cloud announces aggressive LLM price cuts in bid to dominate China's AI market - SiliconANGLE

Alibaba Cloud announces aggressive LLM price cuts in bid to dominate China's AI market Alibaba Cloud said Tuesday that it's slashing the price of access to its most advanced large language models by up to 85% in a bid to generate more interest from Chinese businesses. The move was announced via WeChat and first reported by the South China Morning Post. According to that report, Alibaba Cloud's Qwen-VL-Max model is now priced at just 0.003 yuan ($0.00041) per thousand tokens. Qwen-VL-Max is a visual reasoning model that's designed to perceive and understand both text and image-based inputs, and the new pricing vastly undercuts that of rival models from companies like ByteDance Ltd. Alibaba Cloud is the cloud computing arm of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. The price cuts highlight the aggressive race between China's biggest technology firms to win more business for their nascent artificial intelligence offerings. Alibaba Cloud's rivals in the Chinese AI market include the likes of Tencent Holdings Ltd., Baidu Inc., JD.Com Inc., Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. and ByteDance, which is the parent company of TikTok. Over the last 18 months, those companies have all launched competing LLMs that aim to capitalize on the hype around generative AI tech. LLMs are AI models that are trained on vast quantities of data in order to generate humanlike responses to user's queries and prompts. They are the foundation of various generative AI chatbots, such as Google's Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT, as well as next generation search engines like Perplexity AI and image generators like DALL-E. Alibaba is focusing its efforts on Chinese enterprises, which are just as interested in the potential of generative AI to improve productivity as their U.S. counterparts. In May, Alibaba Cloud said that more than 90,000 enterprises in the country had downloaded its Qwen models. However, the company faces intense competition. In the last year, Chinese generative AI developers launched more than 250 new LLMs for public use. Along with its biggest tech firms, the country is also home to a number of hot startups, such as DeepSeek, which recently announced the DeepSeek-V3 LLM with 671 billion parameters, making it one of the most powerful open-source models available. Alibaba Cloud's Qwen models encompass Qwen-VL, Qwen-VL-Chat, Qwen-VL-Max, Qwen2-VL and the experimental QVQ-72B-Preview. With its state-of-the-art performance, Qwen2-VL-Max excels in benchmarks such as DocVQA and MathVista, surpassing OpenAI's GPT-4V and Google's Gemini Ultra. The Chinese company's strategy of implementing aggressive price cuts to try and win more business is not new. In February, it announced price reductions of up to 55% on a number of its core cloud computing services, and followed in May by reducing the cost of its original Qwen-VL model by up to 97%.

Alibaba slashes prices on large language models by up to 85% as China AI rivalry heats up

The World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai in July 2023. Alibaba is cutting prices on its large language models by up to 85%, the Chinese tech giant announced Tuesday. 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. Shares of Alibaba didn't move much on the announcement, closing 0.5% higher on the final trading day of the year in Hong Kong. Nevertheless, the price cuts demonstrate how the race among China's technology giants to win more business for their nascent artificial intelligence products is intensifying.