Tencent is latest Chinese tech giant to enter LLM price war, adding pressure on AI start-ups
- The lite version of Tencent’s Hunyuan LLM will now be free of charge, while prices of the standard versions will be slashed by 50 to 87.5 per cent, effective immediately
- Tencent’s announcement came just hours after iFlyTek significantly reduced the price of some versions of its Spark LLM, while making its lite version free
Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) companies are waging a full-fledged price war in hopes of finding ways to commercialise their large language models (LLMs), analysts say, with Tencent Holdings the latest tech giant to slash prices for its products.
The lite version of Tencent’s Hunyuan LLM – the technology behind ChatGPT and other generative AI services – will now be free of charge, while prices of the standard versions will be slashed by 50 to 87.5 per cent, effective immediately, according to an announcement from the firm’s cloud unit on Wednesday.
The pro version of Hunyuan will have a 70 per cent price cut for input while keeping the same charge for output.
“The LLM industry is still in the process of ramping up its capabilities. Tencent Cloud … will continue to provide competitive products and services to the customers,” the company statement said.
Tencent’s announcement came just hours after iFlyTek significantly reduced the price of some versions of its Spark LLM, while making its lite version free.