Poster News Reporter Sun Jie reports
On May 21st, Alibaba Cloud released a heavyweight news: the Qwen Long, the main model of the Tongyi Qianwen GPT-4, saw a 97% drop in API input prices from 0.02 yuan/thousand tokens to 0.0005 yuan/thousand tokens. This means that one yuan can buy 2 million tokens, which is equivalent to the amount of text in 5 New China Dictionary books. This model supports up to 10 million tokens of long text input, and after a price reduction, it is about 1/400 of the GPT-4 price, breaking through the global bottom price.
Qwen Long is a long text enhanced version of the Tongyi Qianwen model, with performance benchmarking against GPT-4 and a maximum context length of 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, domestic and foreign manufacturers GPT-4, Gemini1.5 Pro, Claude 3 Sonnet, and Ernie 4.0 have input prices of 0.22 yuan, 0.025 yuan, 0.022 yuan, and 0.12 yuan per thousand tokens, respectively, which are much higher than Qwen long.
The price reduction of Tongyi Qianwen this time covers a total of 9 commercial and open source series models. The recently released flagship model Qwen Max from Tongyi Qianwen has reduced its API input price to 0.04 yuan/thousand tokens, a decrease of 67%. Qwen Max is currently the best performing Chinese large model in the industry, with performance comparable to GPT-4 Turbo on the authoritative benchmark OpenCompass, and ranking in the top 15 globally in the big model arena Chatbot Arena.
Not long ago, Sam Altman from OpenAI forwarded the Chatbot Arena ranking to confirm the GPT-4o's capabilities. Among the top 20 global models, only three Chinese models were produced by Tongyi Qianwen.
The industry generally believes that as the performance of large models gradually improves, AI application innovation is entering a period of intensive exploration. However, high inference costs remain a key factor restricting the large-scale application of large models.
At the Wuhan AI Leaders Summit, Liu Weiguang, Senior Vice President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Group and President of Public Cloud Business Unit, said, "As China's largest cloud computing company, Alibaba Cloud has significantly reduced the price of large model inference this time in order to accelerate the explosion of AI applications. We expect the number of calls to large model APIs to increase by thousands of times in the future."