ByteDance, Alibaba, and Baidu Slash LLM Prices to Fight Competition

The biggest Chinese tech players, including ByteDance, Alibaba, and Baidu, have significantly reduced prices of large-language models LLM to fight off competition with multiple sectors of the Chinese consumer economy locked in fierce price wars.

Last week, TikTok owner ByteDance revealed the slashed price for its Doubao Pro LLM, at 0.0008 yuan per 1,000 tokens, which is reportedly 99% lower than the industry average for enterprise users.

In response, Alibaba’s cloud unit announced up to 97% price cuts on a range of its Tongyi Qwen LLMs. Its Qwen Long model will now cost 0.0005 yuan per 1,000 tokens, down from 0.02 yuan per 1000 tokens.

Following that, Baidu announced that all business users could now avail of its Ernie Speed and Ernie Lite models for free.

A price war in China's cloud computing space has been ongoing for the past few months, with Alibaba and Tencent recently lowering the prices of their cloud computing services.

The competitive price war in China’s cloud computing sector has now impacted the LLMs that support chatbots, potentially reducing companies’ profit margins.