A price war breaks out among China’s AI-model builders
It may stymie innovation
PRICE WARS are ten a penny in China. The emergence of hundreds of lookalike companies seemingly overnight is pushing down retail prices of everything from electric vehicles to bike-sharing and bubble tea. The latest products to enter the ruinous fray are artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbots. This may seem surprising. Until recently China’s problem was not a surfeit of large language models (LLMs), the sort that makes ChatGPT a humanlike content-creator, but their dearth. At the start of 2023 experts reckoned that the Chinese LLMs that did exist were a decade behind the American cutting edge.
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This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “The LLM summer sale”
Business June 15th 2024
- The war for AI talent is heating up
- A price war breaks out among China’s AI-model builders
- The EU hits China’s carmakers with hefty new tariffs
- The rise of the hard right alarms German business leaders
- What Indian business expects from Modi 3.0
- How Gen Zs rebel against Asia’s rigid corporate culture
- Hey Siri! Help me get Apple out of an AI-shaped hole
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