Alibaba’s (BABA) cloud unit cuts costs of AI fashions by as much as 85%

Alibaba is lowering the costs of its main language fashions by as much as 85%, the Chinese language expertise big introduced on Tuesday.

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing division of the Hangzhou-based e-commerce firm, stated in a submit on WeChat that it’s providing value reductions on its visible language mannequin, Qwen-VL, designed to understand and perceive at each texts and pictures.

Alibaba shares didn’t transfer a lot following the announcement, closing up 0.5% on the final buying and selling day of the yr in Hong Kong.

Nonetheless, the value cuts display how the race amongst Chinese language tech giants to win extra markets for his or her new synthetic intelligence merchandise is intensifying.

Main Chinese language expertise corporations, together with Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, JD.comHuawei and TikTok mother or father firm Bytedance have all launched their very own main language fashions up to now 18 months, in search of to capitalize on the hype across the expertise.

This isn’t the primary time Alibaba has introduced value cuts to encourage companies to make use of its AI merchandise. In February, the corporate announced price reductions of up to 55% throughout a variety of core cloud merchandise. Most not too long ago, in Might, the corporate decreased the costs of its Qwen AI mannequin. up to 97% with the goal of stimulating demand.

Massive language fashions, or LLMs for brief, are AI fashions which are educated on giant quantities of knowledge to generate human responses to person queries and prompts. They type the muse of in the present day’s generative AI programs, like ChatGPT, the favored AI chatbot from Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI.

In Alibaba’s case, the corporate is focusing its LLM efforts on the enterprise section slightly than launching a client AI chatbot like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In Might, the corporate stated its Qwen fashions had been deployed by greater than 90,000 enterprise customers.