Asia Tech Wire (June 25) -- Alibaba and Baidu have unveiled plans to lure users after OpenAI announced it would stop API services in China.

OpenAI, which owns the globally popular chat note-taking bot ChatGPT, has announced the termination of its API service to China.

Starting July 9, OpenAI said it will take additional measures to block API traffic from regions such as China that are not on its list of supported countries and territories.

After the news circulated, Bailian, Alibaba's large model service platform, announced that it will provide cost-effective Chinese alternatives for OpenAI API users and offer 22 million free tokens and exclusive migration services for Chinese developers.

Stanford University's HELM leaderboard shows that Alibaba's open source model Qwen2-72B scored 0.824, tying for fourth in the world with OpenAI's GPT-4.

Meanwhile, Google's Chinese counterpart Baidu on Tuesday also announced the launch of an inclusive program for its large models to attract API users.

Under the program, Baidu will provide free calling, training, and migration services for newly registered enterprise users from now on.

Among them, the ERNIE flagship model is free for the first time, gifting a package of 50 million tokens for the ERNIE 3.5 flagship model, among others.

Specifically, for OpenAI migration users, the company is additionally giving away a package of tokens for the ERNIE3.5 flagship model that are equivalent to the scale of OpenAI usage.

However, all these offers from Baidu are applicable until July 25, 2024 at 12:00 pm.

(Reporting by Bruce Tu; Editing by Vincy Lu)