Alibaba is cutting pricing for its most advanced cloud-based visual large language model, called Qwen-vl-max, by up to 85%, the South China Morning Post reported. This is Alibaba’s second LLM price cut this year and highlights the growing competition between it and rivals like ByteDance, Baidu, and Tencent for cloud AI spending. Alibaba, the largest cloud provider in China’s domestic market, is hoping that AI can revitalize this part of its business, where growth has slowed significantly in recent years. Last month, Alibaba launched an open-source reasoning model that generated positive reactions on social media and demonstrated its ability to compete in an emerging area of generative AI. The AI competition in China is gaining steam despite U.S. authorities’ efforts to block Chinese firms from using Nvidia’s latest graphics processing units. ByteDance, which owns TikTok, plans to spend $7 billion to access Nvidia Hopper AI chips and its forthcoming Blackwell chips outside China in 2025, as we reported earlier this week. https://www.scmp.com/tech.. #🇨🇳 ChinA.I. 🤖🧠🦾🤖