Tencent AI joins price war

Tencent (0700) Artificial Intelligence cut prices, following Alibaba (9988) and Baidu (9888).

Tencent Cloud announced an upgrade for its flagship large model Hunyuan-Lite, expanding the Application Programming Interface input and output length from 4k to 256k and transitioning from the previous charge of 0.008 yuan (HK$0.0087) per thousand tokens to completely free.

The newly launched Hunyuan-Standard-256k, with the ability to process ultra-long texts exceeding 380,000 characters, saw an 87.5 percent reduction in API input prices and a 50 percent in API output prices.

And iFlytek also announced yesterday opening one of its Spark large-language models to free users, joining the price war fueled by Alibaba and Baidu.

Hefei-based iFlytek, best known for its voice recognition technology, said Spark Lite would be free for the public to use while Spark Pro/Max would cost only 0.21 yuan, or less than 3 cents, per 10,000 tokens, or units of data processed by the LLM.

Meanwhile, Lenovo (0992) surged 12 percent after it launched a new AI laptop, in cooperation with Qualcomm and Microsoft.

Lenovo announced on Monday its new products, the Yoga Slim 7x and ThinkPad T14s Gen 6, each equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processor. These two laptops will reportedly be available next month, with expected prices starting at US$1,199 (HK$9,359.40) and US$1,699 respectively.