Alibaba Cloud Slashes Prices of Its Visual Reasoning AI Model by Up to 85%

The announcement, coming on the last day of 2024, marks the third AI price cut by Alibaba Cloud this year, and comes on the heels of similar moves by TikTok parent ByteDance

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group Holding, has slashed prices for its visual reasoning artificial intelligence (AI) model by up to 85 per cent in the latest move to woo users in a crowded market.

The announcement, made on the last day of 2024, marks the third AI price cut by Alibaba Cloud this year and comes on the heels of a similar move by TikTok parent ByteDance.

The cost for using Qwen-vl-max, Alibaba Cloud’s most advanced visual model, will be cut to 0.003 yuan (US$0.00041) per thousand input token uses, according to the new pricing.

The adjustment will position Qwen-vl-max as a direct competitor to a similar visual model that ByteDance launched in the middle of the month in terms of cost, underscoring the intense rivalry in China’s AI market.

ByteDance introduced a new model with “visual understanding” capabilities at a corporate event earlier this month. The pricing level of 0.003 yuan per thousand token users was 85 per cent lower than the industry average, Tan Dai, president of ByteDance’s Volcano Engine cloud unit, said at the time.