iFlytek enters China’s AI language model price war


Artificial intelligence (AI) firm iFlytek on Wednesday entered a brewing price war between some of China’s biggest tech companies, after it made some versions of its “Spark” large-language model (LLM) free or five times cheaper than similar products from competitors.
The move comes a day after Chinese tech giants Alibaba (9988.HK), opens new tab and Baidu (9888.HK), opens new tab slashed prices of their LLMs used to power generative AI products, and a week after Bytedance made a similar move.
iFlytek last September launched a ChatGPT-like product, “Spark”, which the company claimed the following month surpassed ChatGPT 3.5 in Chinese language tasks, while displaying comparable performance in English.