On May 21, Alibaba Cloud announced that the API input price of Qwen Long, the main GPT-4 model of Tongyi Qianwen, dropped from 0.02 yuan/thousand tokens to 0.0005 yuan/thousand tokens, down 97%.
This means that one yuan can buy 2 million tokens, which is equivalent to the text volume of five Xinhua Dictionaries. It is understood that this model supports up to 10 million token long text input, which is about 1/400 of the GPT-4 price after price reduction.
Tongyi Qianwen Great Price Reduction
With the gradual improvement of large model performance, AI application innovation is entering an intensive exploration period, but the high reasoning cost is still the key factor restricting large-scale application of large models.
Qwen Long is an enhanced version of the long text model with the meaning of Qianwen. Its performance benchmarking is GPT-4, and the context length is up to 10 million. In addition to the input price dropping to 0.0005 yuan/thousand tokens, the output price of Qwen Long has also dropped by 90% to 0.002 yuan/thousand tokens. In contrast, the input prices of GPT-4, Gemini1.5 Pro, Claude 3 Sonnet and Ernie-4.0 per thousand tokens from domestic and foreign manufacturers are 0.22 yuan, 0.025 yuan, 0.022 yuan and 0.12 yuan respectively, which are much higher than Qwen long.
This price reduction of Tongyi Qianwen covers 9 commercial and open source series models. The API input price of Qwen Max, the flagship model of Tongyi Qianwen recently released, dropped to 0.04 yuan/thousand tokens, a 67% drop. Qwen Max is currently the best performing Chinese model in the industry. Its performance on the authoritative benchmark OpenCompass is equal to that of GPT-4-Turbo, and it ranks among the top 15 in the world in the Chatbot Arena.
API calls will grow massively
Liu Weiguang, senior vice president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Group and president of the Public Cloud Business Division, said today that Alibaba Cloud's sharp reduction in the price of big model reasoning is intended to accelerate the explosion of AI applications. "We expect that the number of calls to big model APIs will grow thousands of times in the future."
Liu Weiguang believes that whether it is an open source model or a commercial model, public cloud+API will become the mainstream way for enterprises to use large models. There are three main reasons: first, the technology dividend and scale effect of public cloud will bring huge cost and performance advantages. Second, it is more convenient to call multiple models on the cloud and provide enterprise level data security. The third is the natural openness of cloud manufacturers, which can provide developers with the most abundant models and tool chains.
On May 9, Alibaba Cloud officially released Tongyi Qianq2.5, and the performance of the Chinese scene model comprehensively surpassed GPT-4-Turbo. Compared with the previous version, the understanding ability, logical reasoning, instruction following, and code ability of the 2.5 version model are improved by 9%, 16%, 19%, and 10% respectively. According to the evaluation results of the authoritative benchmark Open Compass, Tongyi Qianwen 2.5 scores equal to GPT-4-Turbo, which is the first time that the benchmark has recorded such outstanding achievements of domestic large models.
The price of cloud products has been reduced across the board
Just one month ago, Alibaba Cloud officially announced a price reduction across the overseas market, covering the core cloud products deployed in 13 regional nodes around the world and more than 500 product specifications, with an average decrease of 23% and a maximum decrease of 59%. The price reduction involves five major categories of main products: computing, storage, network, database and big data.
Among them, the maximum price reduction of ECS is 30%, that of block storage EBS is 59%, and that of big data products is 50%; Target storage OSS added 500GB new and old shared discount, and the package price dropped from $63 to $16.99; The free amount of CDT public network traffic for cloud data transmission was increased from 20GB/month to 200GB/month, and the maximum decrease of RDS was 50%.
In February, Alibaba Cloud announced a price reduction of more than 20% for all products, which is also known as the largest price reduction in Alibaba Cloud history. Brokers in China once reported that "Top notch! Powerful official announcement: more than 20% price reduction across the line! How big is the impact?": On February 29, Alibaba Cloud reduced the price of its cloud products on the official website across the line, with an average price reduction of more than 20%, and a maximum price reduction of 55%. After this round of price reduction, the prices of Alibaba Cloud core products broke through the lowest prices of the whole network.
