BEIJING, May 22 (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence (AI)

firm iFlytek on Wednesday entered a brewing price war between

some of China's biggest tech companies, after it made some

versions of its "Spark" large-language model (LLM) free or five

times cheaper than similar products from competitors.

The move comes a day after Chinese tech giants Alibaba ( BABA )

and Baidu ( BIDU ) slashed prices of their LLMs used

to power generative AI products, and a week after Bytedance made

a similar move.

iFlytek last September launched a ChatGPT-like product,

"Spark", which the company claimed the following month surpassed

ChatGPT 3.5 in Chinese language tasks, while displaying

comparable performance in English.

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.

This new pricing is five times cheaper than the 1.2 yuan per

10,000 tokens charged by Baidu's ( BIDU ) Ernie 4.0 and Alibaba's ( BABA ) Tongyi

Qwen-Max.

One token is equivalent to 1.5 Chinese characters in Spark,

meaning 10 tokens for the price of 2.1 yuan ($0.29) was enough

for Spark Max to generate all of Yu Hua's popular novel "To

Live", according to a statement published on iFlytek's official

WeChat account.

State-owned China Mobile is iFlytek's largest

shareholder with a 10% stake.

($1 = 7.2393 Chinese yuan renminbi)