BEIJING, May 22 (Reuters) - China's most valuable

internet company Tencent ( TCTZF ) and artificial intelligence

(AI) firm iFlytek on Wednesday slashed prices of

large-language models(LLM) used to power ChatGPT-like chatbots,

entering a brewing price war between some of the country's

biggest tech companies.

Tencent's ( TCTZF ) cloud unit said the "lite" version of its LLM,

Hunyuan, was now free, while prices of more powerful versions

were cut by between 50% and 88%. A few hours prior, iFlytek said

its "Spark" LLM was either free or five times cheaper than

similar products from competitors.

On Tuesday, the cloud unit of Chinese tech giant Alibaba ( BABA )

and search engine conglomerate Baidu ( BIDU ) slashed

prices of their LLMs, and Bytedance made a similar move last

week.

Tencent ( TCTZF ) and iFlytek launched ChatGPT-like products in

September, joining a race between Chinese tech firms to become

the country's generative AI champion which a Tencent ( TCTZF ) executive

dubbed "a war of hundred models".

Both companies claimed at the time that their LLMs

performed better in some tasks than U.S.-based OpenAI's ChatGPT,

which debuted in late 2022.

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.

The 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, while Tencent's ( TCTZF ) Hunyuan pro is 0.2-0.9 yuan cheaper

per 10,000 tokens.

One token is equivalent to 1.5 Chinese characters in Spark,

meaning 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.

($1 = 7.2393 Chinese yuan renminbi)