Alibaba Cloud just made a big move in the AI market. They’ve cut prices on their visual reasoning AI model by up to 85%. This is a nice surprise for users as the competition heats up in China’s AI services.
This announcement came on the last day of 2024. It marks the third time this year that Alibaba Cloud has reduced its AI prices. They’re not alone in this. ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, has also made similar moves. Everyone is trying to grab attention in this crowded space.
Now, the cost for using Qwen-vl-max, Alibaba Cloud’s top visual model, is just 0.003 yuan (around US$0.00041) for every thousand input tokens. This price puts Qwen-vl-max in direct competition with a similar model that ByteDance launched earlier this month.
ByteDance introduced their new model with “visual understanding” features at a corporate event in December. They set their price at the same 0.003 yuan per thousand tokens, which is 85% lower than the industry average, according to Tan Dai, president of ByteDance’s Volcano Engine cloud unit.