China's leading internet search company, Baidu, has introduced the latest version of its large language model, Ernie 4.0 Turbo, to enterprise clients, Baidu Vice President Xie Guangjun announced at an event in Shanghai. The new model is priced at 30 yuan ($4.13) per million input tokens and 60 yuan per million output tokens. Baidu also announced significant price cuts of up to 83% for earlier Ernie models to stay competitive.

The adoption of Ernie has seen a substantial increase, with average daily usage rising by 150% in the second quarter. The surge in usage reflects the growing interest and reliance on advanced AI models in China.

The competitive landscape intensifies as significant tech firms and LLM startups in the country offer free credits or tremendous discounts to attract developers to their platforms. These price differences highlight the aggressive pricing strategies Chinese companies employ to capture market share in the rapidly evolving AI industry.