At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai in July 2023, Alibaba announced significant price cuts of up to 85% on its large language model, Qwen-VL, which processes text and images. This move reflects the intensifying competition among China’s tech giants, including Tencent, Baidu, and JD.com, to capture the growing demand for AI products. Alibaba has previously cut prices on its AI offerings, including up to 55% in February and 97% in May, to incentivize enterprise adoption. Unlike other firms, Alibaba focuses on the enterprise segment with over 90,000 users for its Qwen models, rather than consumer AI chatbots.
