China's leading internet company Tencent and artificial intelligence (AI) firm iFlytek have initiated a price war by significantly reducing prices for large-language models (LLMs) used to power ChatGPT-like chatbots.
Tencent's cloud division announced that its "lite" version of the LLM, Hunyuan, is now offered for free, while prices for more robust versions have been slashed by 50% to 88%. In a similar move, iFlytek introduced its "Spark" LLM, either free of charge or at a price five times lower than comparable products from competitors.
This pricing battle was preceded by Alibaba's cloud division and Baidu reducing prices for their LLMs, with Bytedance making a similar move the previous week.
Tencent and iFlytek entered the ChatGPT-like products market in September, joining other Chinese tech giants in a race to dominate the country's generative AI sector, which a Tencent executive described as "a war of hundred models."
Both companies asserted that their LLMs outperformed the U.S.-based OpenAI's ChatGPT in certain tasks when they were launched.
iFlytek, headquartered in Hefei and renowned for its voice recognition technology, announced that Spark Lite would be available to the public for free, while Spark Pro/Max would cost only 0.21 yuan per 10,000 tokens. This pricing is five times lower than the rates charged by competitors like Baidu and Alibaba.
For example, 2.1 yuan ($0.29) is sufficient for Spark Max to generate the entirety of Yu Hua's popular novel "To Live," considering that one token equates to 1.5 Chinese characters in Spark.
This price reduction underscores the fierce competition in China's AI landscape and aims to attract users by offering more affordable and accessible AI-powered solutions.
