The prices of large-language models (LLM), which are used to power chatbots similar to ChatGPT, have been drastically reduced, starting a price war between some of the largest tech companies in China. Tencent, the most valuable internet company in China, opened a new tab on Wednesday, while iFlytek, an artificial intelligence firm, opened a new tab on the same day.
The “lite version of Tencent’s cloud unit, Hunyuan, is now free, while more powerful versions have prices slashed by up to 88%. Only hours earlier, iFlytek claimed that its “Spark” LLM was either accessible or five times less expensive than comparable goods from rival companies.
At the time, both businesses asserted that their LLMs outperformed ChatGPT, a product of American startup OpenAI, in a few tasks. ChatGPT launched in late 2022.
According to Hefei-based iFlytek, best known for its voice recognition technology, the public could use Spark Lite for free, while Spark Pro/Max would only cost 0.21 yuan, or less than 3 cents, per 10,000 tokens or units of data processed by the LLM.
The new pricing is five times less expensive per 10,000 tokens than Baidu’s Ernie 4.0 and Alibaba’s Tongyi Qwen-Max, which charge 1.2 yuan per 10,000 tokens. Tencent’s Hunyuan pro charges between 0.2 and 0.9 yuan less per 10,000 tokens.
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