Title: The AI Tide is surging: The end of the free era, the rise of the charging tide
In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), the end of the free era is quietly happening, and the tide of charging for AI products is intensifying. Baidu's Wenxin Yiyan Pro is a shining star in this trend, marking the beginning of the era of charging for domestic generative AI products.
The story begins with the strong debut of Wenxin Yiyan Model 4.0. At this year's Baidu World 2023 conference, Baidu Chairman and CEO Robin Li proudly announced that Wenxin Model 4.0 is the most powerful version to date, comprehensively upgrading the basic model, and achieving significant improvements in the four major capabilities of understanding, generation, logic, and memory. This news has excited the entire AI industry, showing the rapid development trend of AI technology.
Not only Baidu, but other giants have also jumped on the wave of commercialization of AI products. DingTalk announced at the 2023 Ecological Conference that 17 product lines and 55 scenarios have been connected to the large model. At the same time, they announced the commercialization plan of the application scenario of the large model, and enterprise users only need to pay a certain annual fee to obtain the number of calls of the large model.
However, behind the charging of AI products is the huge demand for computing resources behind them. Generative AI products require a large number of high-performance servers, huge datasets, and a large team of algorithm engineers to train and run. In this context, AI giants are turning to a paid model to maintain the sustainability of their services.
Abroad, as early as February this year, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Plus, a paid subscription version of ChatGPT, which costs $20 per month. On August 28, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Enterprise Edition based on GPT-4, with pricing based on each company's needs and budget. Other companies such as Anthropic, Adobe, Microsoft, etc., have also launched paid versions to promote the commercialization of generative AI products.
The launch of Baidu's Wenxin Yiyan Professional Edition means that domestic generative AI products have entered the era of charging. However, it is still unknown whether it will be successfully commercialized. After all, in addition to Wenxin Yiyan, there are dozens of free trial generative AI products and various open-source versions of large models in China, forming a fierce market competition.
The AI open-source community has gathered more than 2,300 high-quality models, with more than 100 million model downloads. Among them, Alibaba's self-developed Tongyi model has been open-sourced in 7B and 14B versions, with a total of more than 1 million downloads. Alibaba Cloud plans to open source the 72B version of Tongyi Qianwen in the near future, adding new strength to the AI open source community.
In addition to technological innovation, various companies are also upgrading and iterating on large-scale model products. On October 17, Baidu released version 4.0 of the Wenxin model and several applications of AI reconstruction. On October 24, iFLYTEK launched the iFLYTEK Xinghuo cognitive model V3.0. On October 26, Tencent announced a new upgrade of the hybrid model and officially opened the "Wensheng Map" function. At the Apsara Conference on October 31, Alibaba Cloud released the 100-billion-level parameter model Tongyi Qianwen 2.0 and officially launched the Tongyi Qianwen APP.
With the continuous emergence of large models, the pace of commercialization in the AI industry is accelerating. Although foreign countries are ahead in terms of technological innovation, they are more powerful in terms of application capabilities. Wang Xiaochuan, founder and CEO of Baichuan Intelligence, said that although the development speed of China's large model is "one step slower in the ideal and three steps faster in landing", China has stronger strength in application.
This wave of AI commercialization is setting off a new page, and the era of charging for AI products has arrived. In this era, users will pay more attention to the quality and performance of services, and AI companies will also need more funds to support their sustainable development. The era of free is over, and the future of AI will usher in a more brilliant development driven by business models.