Alibaba Cloud Slashes AI Model Prices by 85%, Matching ByteDance, in Fierce China Market Battle

The announcement, coming on the last day of 2024, marks the third AI price cut by Alibaba Cloud this year, and comes on the heels of similar moves by TikTok parent ByteDance

Alibaba Cloud, Alibaba Group Holding’s cloud computing division, has slashed prices on its visual reasoning artificial intelligence (AI) model by up to 85 per cent in the latest move in a price war among domestic AI services providers.

The announcement, made on the last day of 2024, marks the third AI price cut by Alibaba Cloud this year and follows similar moves by TikTok parent ByteDance as China’s Big Tech firms try to woo users in a crowded market.

Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

The cost for using Qwen-vl-max, Alibaba Cloud’s most advanced visual model, has been cut to 0.003 yuan (US$0.00041) per thousand input token uses, according to the new pricing.

The adjustment will position Qwen-vl-max as a direct competitor to a similar visual model that ByteDance launched in the middle of the month in terms of cost, underscoring the intense rivalry in China’s AI market.

ByteDance introduced a new model with “visual understanding” capabilities at a corporate event earlier this month. The pricing level of 0.003 yuan per thousand token users was 85 per cent lower than the industry average, Tan Dai, president of ByteDance’s Volcano Engine cloud unit, said at the time.