The World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai in July 2023.
Aly Song | Reuters
Alibaba is slicing costs on its massive language fashions by as much as 85%, the Chinese tech big introduced Tuesday.
The Hangzhou-based e-commerce agency’s cloud computing division, Alibaba Cloud, stated in a WeChat publish that it is providing the worth cuts on its visible language mannequin, Qwen-VL, which is designed to understand and perceive each texts and pictures.
Shares of Alibaba did not transfer a lot on the announcement, closing 0.5% larger on the ultimate buying and selling day of the yr in Hong Kong.
Nevertheless, the worth cuts display how the race amongst China’s expertise giants to win extra enterprise for his or her nascent synthetic intelligence merchandise is intensifying.
Major Chinese tech corporations together with Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, JD.com, Huawei and TikTook guardian firm Bytedance have all launched their very own massive language fashions over the previous 18 months, trying to capitalize on the hype across the expertise.
It’s not the primary time Alibaba has introduced value cuts to incentivize companies to make use of its AI merchandise. In February, the corporate announced price reductions of as much as 55% on a variety of core cloud merchandise. More lately, in May, the corporate lowered costs on its Qwen AI mannequin by as much as 97% in a bid to spice up demand.
Large language fashions, or LLMs for brief, are AI fashions which are educated on huge portions of knowledge to generate humanlike responses to person queries and prompts. They are the bedrock for at the moment’s generative AI programs, like Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI’s widespread AI chatbot, ChatGPT.
In Alibaba’s case, the corporate is focusing its LLM efforts on the enterprise section reasonably than launching a shopper AI chatbot like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In May, the corporate stated its Qwen fashions have been deployed by over 90,000 enterprise customers.
