Alibaba sparks China AI price war with spate of steep discounts

(Bloomberg) — Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. slashed prices for a clutch of artificial intelligence services by as much as 97%, spurring an immediate response from Baidu Inc. in potentially the start of a price war in China's nascent AI market. Most Read from Bloomberg Baidu Cloud said it would offer free services based on its Ernie AI models on Tuesday, hours after Alibaba offered deals on nine products built atop its own Tongyi Qianwen. ByteDance Ltd. last week announced pricing for AI services that it said were 99% lower than Chinese industry norms, using Ernie and Alibaba's Qwen as benchmarks….