In the ever-changing landscape of the tech industry, Alibaba Cloud has once again made headlines with its bold pricing strategy. At the 2024 Yunqi Conference, Alibaba Group not only showcased the future vision of AI technology but also announced a remarkable decision: a maximum price reduction of up to 85% for AI large models. This move is set to create waves throughout the tech community and bring new possibilities for the popularization and application of AI technology.
Alibaba Group CEO Daniel Wu delivered a significant speech at the conference, emphasizing that the impact of generative AI will far exceed that of mobile applications, profoundly changing our way of life. He pointed out that over the past 22 months, the development speed of AI technology has been unprecedented, with large models significantly enhancing their multimodal capabilities and complex instruction processing abilities. The speed at which model inference costs are falling even surpasses the expectations set by Moore's Law.
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Since last year, Alibaba Cloud has implemented a price reduction strategy for its large model product lines, aiming to promote the widespread application of AI large models across various industries. In May of this year, Alibaba Cloud's significant price reduction for its Tongyi Qianwen GPT-4-level model drew industry attention, followed by competitors like Baidu and Tencent, sparking a "hundred model battle."
Alibaba Cloud CTO Zhou Jingren stated that with the exponential growth in the scale of large models and the continuous decline in computing power costs, the cost for enterprises to use AI models is significantly decreasing. This is due to the comprehensive innovation of AI infrastructure, and Alibaba Cloud is committed to continuing to invest in advanced AI infrastructure to promote the application of large models in more fields.
At this conference, Alibaba Cloud announced the latest upgrade of the Tongyi large model and significantly reduced the prices of three main models. Among them, the price reduction for the Qwen-Turbo model is as high as 85%, which will undoubtedly greatly lower the threshold for enterprises and developers to use AI large models. At the same time, Alibaba Cloud is actively expanding the AI computing power market to meet the growing customer demand.
Daniel Wu is full of confidence in the future of AI technology. He predicts that generative AI will create value far exceeding that of the mobile internet by enhancing productivity. With technological advancements, the digital world will be dominated by AI, and many things in the physical world will also possess AI capabilities, forming a new AI-driven product. He specifically pointed out that the automotive and robotics industries are facing such significant changes.
To address the exponential growth in future GPU computing power demand, Wu pledged that Alibaba Cloud will invest unprecedentedly in AI technology research and infrastructure development. He stated that Alibaba Cloud is fully prepared to welcome the upcoming AI inference market explosion.
