ByteDance Slash Prices for Advanced AI Model in China's Brutal Price War
Sign up for ARPU: Stay ahead of the curve on tech news.
ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, has intensified the Chinese generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) market rivalry by slashing the price of its new AI model with "visual understanding" capabilities, reports the South China Morning Post.
The new model, part of the company's Doubao family, was introduced at 0.003 yuan (US$0.00041) per thousand token uses, announced Tan Dai, president of ByteDance's Volcano Engine cloud unit, at a corporate event on Wednesday.
This price, 85% lower than the industry average, means users can process up to 284 high-definition images for just 1 yuan.
ByteDance's aggressive pricing strategy underscores the growing rivalry in the Chinese AI market, where tech giants and well-funded startups are engaged in a fierce price war to attract customers.
The Doubao model, capable of understanding text, physical objects, and spatial relationships in images, also boasts enhanced reasoning abilities.
This price cut follows a trend among Chinese tech firms, including Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, and several startups, to drastically reduce API prices for their AI models, with some even offering basic services for free with certain conditions.