The company's cloud computing arm, Alibaba Cloud, shared this news via a WeChat post, highlighting the price cuts for its visual language model, Qwen-VL, which is capable of interpreting both text and images.
Following the announcement, Alibaba's stock saw a slight increase, closing 0.5% higher on the last trading day of the year in Hong Kong.
This move underscores the growing competition among China's tech giants to capture more market share in the emerging artificial intelligence sector.
In the past 18 months, major players like Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, JD.com, Huawei, and Bytedance have all rolled out their own large language models, eager to ride the wave of excitement surrounding this technology.
This isn’t the first time Alibaba has slashed prices to attract businesses to its AI offerings. Earlier this year, in February, they announced reductions of up to 55% on various core cloud services. More recently, in May, they cut prices on their Qwen AI model by as much as 97% to stimulate demand.
Large language models, or LLMs, are AI systems trained on extensive datasets to produce human-like responses to user inquiries. They form the foundation of today’s generative AI technologies, such as OpenAI's well-known chatbot, ChatGPT.
Unlike OpenAI, Alibaba is directing its LLM initiatives towards the enterprise market instead of launching a consumer-focused AI chatbot. In May, the company reported that over 90,000 enterprise users have adopted its Qwen models.