The US has been the centre of attention as the artificial intelligence arms race heats up. Big tech companies backed by massive balance sheets have invested billions in revolutionary technology to strengthen their products, services, and competitive edge. Microsoft has been at the forefront of the investment spree, having forked over $13 billion to gain access to OpenAI’s AI innovations.
China AI Discounts
Even as the focus remains on the US, a fierce arms race is also heating up in China as companies look to affirm their status around AI innovation. While Chinese companies are best known for deploying deep discounts as part of their aggressive marketing plays, the strategy is also slowly finding its way into the AI world.
Chinese tech companies are increasingly offering them at great discounts to sway people to use their large language models. The tech giants are increasingly offering deep discounts to win over customers in a field with more than 200 large language models. Alibaba and Baidu ByteDance are some companies offering deep discounts to large language models powering their chatbots.
ByteDance has been the most aggressive in getting its AI innovations to the mass market, offering its Doubao LLM at 0.0008 Yuan per 1000 tokens of its top-of-the-line Doubao Pro. Its pricing is 99% lower than the industry average for enterprise users. Alibaba has already responded by reducing the price of its Qwen LLM models by 97%. Baidu, on its part, says its Ernie LLM model would be available for all business users for free.
The steep price discounts in China are in stark contrast with what their US counterparts offer. For instance, OpenAI charges $20 monthly to access its ChatGPT Plus chatbot. On the other hand, Baidu charges $8.32 a month for access to its high-end Chatbot Ernie bot.
It is common for Chinese companies to offer deep discounts for their products or services. It is one of the strategies the companies use to grab market share from competitors. The strategy has been used successfully in various sectors, with Alibaba deploying it to push for market share in cloud computing. Tencent and JD have also had to respond with similar discounts to shrug off competition.
Fraud Detection Using AI
Meanwhile, MasterCard has found a way to leverage artificial intelligence technology to curb credit card fraud. The payment giant has integrated AI into its fraud prediction technology to identify whenever a credit or debit card is compromised. The company is leveraging the technology to see patterns in stolen cards faster and allow banks to replace them before any damage is done.
In a statement, MasterCard says it can combine additional patterns or context information, including geographic location, time of day and location, to identify compromised cards. Pattern recognition can also be applied reversely, using batches of unprocessed cards to identify potentially exposed merchants or processors. Pattern recognition is leveraged to surpass human capabilities in identifying compromised cards through advanced algorithms rather than relying on traditional database queries or manual techniques.
Even as MasterCard deploys AI in fraud detection, its biggest rival, Visa, is also looking to get consumers to ditch the traditional 16-digit card number. Last week, it announced sweeping changes to how it processes credit and debit transactions in the United States. As a result, Americans will carry fewer physical cards, and the number printed on each card will become less and less relevant.
