Cover reporter Ouyang Hongyu
After Alibaba and Baidu, another giant joined the big model price war.
On May 22, iFLYTEK announced that iFLYTEK's Spark API capability was officially opened for free. Among them, the iFLYTEK Spark Lite API is permanently free of charge, and the iFLYTEK Spark Pro/Max API is as low as 21 yuan/10000 tokens.
Since May, many large models in China have lowered their prices, causing a price war. Just yesterday, Alibaba Cloud announced price reductions for its nine Tongyi models, followed by Baidu, which announced that the two main models of Wenxin model, ERNIE Speed and ERNIE Lite, were free.
The reporter noticed that iFLYTEK adjusted the pricing of iFLYTEK's Spark model by taking multiple factors into consideration. It not only launched the "permanent free" version, but also achieved a lower price on the top version. Taking the output price as an example, the price of iFLYTEK Spark Max API is as low as 21 yuan/10000 Tokens, compared with Baidu Wenxin Yiyan ERNIE-4 0 and Alibaba Tongyi asked Qwen Max the price of 1.2 yuan/10000 Tokens, and iFLYTEK Spark's price was one fifth of Baidu Alibaba's price.
In fact, not only domestic big models are lowering prices, but also foreign big models such as OpenAI are constantly lowering prices. It is understood that since the beginning of 2023, OpenAI has made four price reductions, and the recently released GPT-4o has also achieved a 50% price reduction.
2024 is the first year for the commercialization of the big model, and the application landing has become the focus of industry competition. After the development in the past year, the domestic leading forces of large models have approached the capability of GPT-4. They polish their "internal skills" and focus on users at the same time, so as to gain more market space through price reduction. As iFLYTEK, Baidu, Ali and other domestic big model manufacturers have sharply reduced their prices, the big model has been pushed to a new stage of competition, and the process of "100 model war" has accelerated.
According to the analysis of some insiders, for developers and enterprises, the price of the big model will be significantly reduced or even free, which will largely solve the cost problem of the big model landing, enable developers to achieve the landing of the big model in various scenarios at a lower cost, and also accelerate the popularization and commercialization process of the big model technology.
IDC predicts that in 2026, China's AI large model market will reach US $21.1 billion, and AI will enter a critical period of large-scale implementation and application. McKinsey's report also points out that the use of generative AI in its 63 applications will bring about an annual growth of 2.6 trillion to 4.4 trillion dollars for the global economy. This round of price reduction of domestic large models in turn is not only the intensification of competition in the "Hundred Model War", but also the turning point of commercialization of large models.
