On Wednesday, artificial intelligence (AI) firm iFlytek entered a growing price war among China’s leading tech companies. The company announced that certain versions of its “Spark” large-language model (LLM) would be either free or up to five times cheaper than similar products from competitors.
This announcement followed a series of price reductions from other Chinese tech giants, including Alibaba and Baidu, which had lowered the prices of their LLMs used for generative AI products just a day earlier. Additionally, Bytedance had made a similar price cut the previous week.
Last September, Hefei-based iFlytek launched “Spark,” a ChatGPT-like product. By the following month, the company claimed Spark had outperformed ChatGPT 3.5 in Chinese language tasks and showed comparable performance in English.
Known for its voice recognition technology, iFlytek revealed that Spark Lite would be available to the public for free, while Spark Pro/Max would cost only 0.21 yuan, or less than 3 cents, per 10,000 tokens—units of data processed by the LLM. This new pricing is significantly lower than Baidu’s Ernie 4.0 and Alibaba’s Tongyi Qwen-Max, which charge 1.2 yuan per 10,000 tokens.
In Spark’s system, one token equates to 1.5 Chinese characters. Consequently, for 2.1 yuan ($0.29), Spark Max can generate the entire text of Yu Hua’s popular novel “To Live,” according to a statement on iFlytek’s official WeChat account.
State-owned China Mobile holds a 10% stake in iFlytek, making it the company’s largest shareholder.
