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China's tech giants are battling over AI! Tencent and iFlytek have lowered their language model prices, joining Alibaba and Baidu in a price war to dominate the market for this powerful technology.
BEIJING, May 22 (Reuters) - Large-language models (LLM) used to power ChatGPT-like chatbots were reduced on Wednesday by China's most valuable internet company Tencent (0700.HK), opens new tab, and artificial intelligence (AI) firm iFlytek (002230.SZ), opens new tab, igniting a price war between some of the country's largest tech companies.
Tencent's cloud unit said the "light" form of its LLM, Hunyuan, was presently free, while costs of additional strong adaptations were cut by somewhere in the range of half and 88%. A couple of hours earlier, iFlytek said its "Flash" LLM was either free or multiple times less expensive than comparable items from contenders.
On Tuesday, the cloud unit of Chinese tech monster Alibaba (9988.HK), opens new tab and web search tool combination Baidu (9888.HK), opens new tab cut costs of their LLMs, and Bytedance took a comparable action the week before.
In September, ChatGPT-like products from Tencent and iFlytek joined a race between Chinese tech companies to become China's generative AI champion, which a Tencent executive referred to as "a war of hundred models."
The two organizations guaranteed at the time that their LLMs performed preferred in certain undertakings over U.S.- based OpenAI's ChatGPT, which appeared in late 2022.
Hefei-based iFlytek, most popular for its voice acknowledgment innovation, said Flash Light would be free for the general population to use while Flash Ace/Max would cost just 0.21 yuan, or under 3 pennies, per 10,000 tokens, or units of information handled by the LLM.
The new estimating is multiple times less expensive than the 1.2 yuan per 10,000 tokens charged by Baidu's Ernie 4.0 and Alibaba's Tongyi Qwen-Max, while Tencent's Hunyuan ace is 0.2-0.9 yuan less expensive per 10,000 tokens.
One token is identical to 1.5 Chinese characters in Flash, meaning 2.1 yuan ($0.29) was enough for Flash Max to produce Yu Hua's all's well known novel "To Live", as per an assertion distributed on iFlytek's true WeChat account.
Source: Reuters
