Chinese tech giants cut prices of language models used to power AI chatbots

Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Baidu slashed prices on Tuesday of large-language models (LLMs) used to power generative artificial intelligence products, as a price war in the cloud computing sector heats up in China.

Alibaba’s cloud unit announced price cuts of up to 97 per cent on a range of its Tongyi Qwen LLMs. Its Qwen-Long model, for instance, will cost only 0.0005 yuan per 1,000 tokens – or units of data processed by the LLM – after the price cut, down from 0.02 yuan per 1,000 tokens.