(Yicai) May 21 -- Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, the cloud computing division of Chinese internet giant Alibaba, said it has cut the price of Qwen-Long, its GPT-4-equivalent large language model, by as much as 97 percent to the lowest in the world.

The application programming interface input price of Alibaba Cloud's artificial intelligence model Tongyi Qianwen is now 0.05 Chinese cents (0.007 US cents) per 1,000 tokens from 2 Chinese cents, which is equal to CNY1 (14 US cents) for 2 million tokens, the Hangzhou-based firm said today. 

Qwen-Long, a part of Tongyi Qianwen’s LLM series that supports up to 10 million tokens of long text input, now costs about one-400th of the GPT-4 price.

The steep price drop follows the official release of the Doubao AI model by Volcano Engine, the cloud computing services unit of TikTok owner ByteDance, on May 15. Its main enterprise model costs 0.08 Chinese cents per 1,000 tokens, some 99.3 percent below the industry average.

The development of LLMs is still in the early stages. The number of users in the AI-generated content sector surged nine-fold to 73.8 million in March from a year earlier, accounting for only 6 percent of total mobile internet users, according to data from QuestMobile.

Editor: Martin Kadiev