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Comment by isusmelj | Hacker News Reader

I just wanted to check whether there is any information about the pricing. Is it the same as Qwen Max? Also, I noticed on the pricing page of Alibaba Cloud that the models are significantly cheaper within mainland China. Does anyone know why? https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/model-studio/models?spm...

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There’s a domestic AI price war in China, plus pricing in mainland China benefits from lower cost structures and very substantial government support e.g., local compute power vouchers and subsidies designed to make AI infrastructure cheaper for domestic businesses and widespread adoption. https://www.notebookcheck.net/China-expands-AI-subsidies-wit...

All of this is true and credit assignment is hard, but the brutal competition between Chinese firms, especially in manufacturing, differentiates them from and advances them over economies in the west. It makes investment hard as profits are competed away, which is blasphemy in Thiel's worldview, but is excellent for consumers both local and global.

Yes and: Good for the nations underwriting all that domestic competition. Playbook followed by Japan, South Korea, etc, and most recently China.

I guess they want to partially subsidize local developers?

Maybe that's a requirement from whoever funds them, probably public money.

Seriously? Does Netflix or Spotify cost the same everywhere around the world? They earn less and their buying power is less.

Sure so do professional tools like Microsoft teams or compute in different places of the world.

The costs of Netflix and Spotify are licensing. Offering the subscription at half price to additional users is non-cannibalizing and a way to get more revenue from the same content.

The cost of LLMs are the infrastructure. Unless someone can buy/power/run compute cheaper (Google w/ TPUs, locales with cheap electricity, etc), there won't be a meaningful difference in costs.

That assumes inference efficiency is static, which isn't really the case. Between aggressive quantization, speculative decoding, and better batching strategies, the cost per token can vary wildly on the exact same hardware. I suspect the margins right now come from architecture choices as much as raw power costs.

It could be that energy is a lot cheaper in China, but it could be other reasons, too.

Slightly off-topic, surveillance Pricing is a term being used more often, whereby even hotel room prices vary based on where you're booking from, what terms you searched for etc.

Here's a short video on the subject:

https://youtube.com/shorts/vfIqzUrk40k?si=JQsFBtyKTQz5mYYC

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