China Enters AI Price War; Meta's AI Committee Debate; OpenAI Halts ChatGPT Voice | Weekly AI Highlights
5 Key AI Industry Shifts: Price Wars, Debates, and Surprising Halts
AI advancements in science produce vast amounts of data. Managing issues like data quality and security becomes crucial as technology progresses.
Chinese companies have started a price war for big AI models. Meta makes an AI committee with only white men. People argue about this. ChatGPT AI voice sounds like Scarlett Johansson. OpenAI stops using voice quickly.
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Chinese companies enter the large-model price war!
Alibaba Cloud said on May 21 that their Qwen-Long model got cheaper. It used to cost 0.02 yuan for every thousand words, now it's only 0.0005 yuan. You can get 2 million words for 1 yuan, which is like five big dictionaries. The model can handle 10 million words for less money than before, which is the lowest in the world. A big boss at Alibaba, Liu Weiguang, said they did this to make AI more popular.
Baidu also said on the same day that their two models, ENIRE Speed and ENIRE Lite, are now free. These models can handle very long texts and are good for different uses. Baidu says ENIRE Speed is great for specific problems and works fast. ENIRE Lite is good for places with less power.
On May 22, Tencent Cloud also made their model, Hybrid-Lite, free. They also made it so you can send and get more words, up to 256K. They also lowered the cost of their hybrid-standard model.
Big companies are making their models cheaper or free, which makes it hard for smaller companies. Some important people, like Lee Kaifu and Wang Xiaochuan, talked about this. They think very low prices are not good for anyone. From the whole AI world's point of view, making things cheaper is easy, but making a real business work is much harder.
OpenAI Cancels "Gag" Clauses in Former Employee Departure Agreements
OpenAI had issues with equity and "gag agreements." This Thursday, OpenAI sent a note to former employees. The note canceled the clause that said they can't speak badly about OpenAI. If they did, they would lose their vested equity.
The note was sent to each former employee. It said, "You may have been told you must agree to not speak badly about OpenAI. This was to keep your vested equity. Whether you agree or not, we are telling you OpenAI will not take away your vested equity." The note also said OpenAI will not enforce any other clauses about not speaking badly or not hiring former employees.
An OpenAI spokesperson said, "We are making big updates to our process when people leave." The spokesperson said, "We have not and will never take away vested equity, even if people did not sign papers when leaving. We will remove clauses about not speaking badly from standard leaving papers. We will cancel former employees' obligations not to speak badly unless it applies to both sides." They added former employees will be told this. The spokesperson also said, "We apologize for the language used until now. It does not show our values or the company we want to be."
Meta Announces Establishment of AI Committee: All-White Male Lineup Sparks Controversy
Meta started a new group to help with their AI. The group had four men, all white, which many people did not like.
The group has a boss from Stripe, a past boss from GitHub, a boss from Shopify, and a man who used to work at Microsoft. Meta said they won't get paid and will talk to Meta's leaders to help with their technology.
But TechCrunch, a website about tech, said this is not good because there are no women or people with different skin colors in the group. They think everyone should be part of making new AI things.
Sarah, who works at a place that looks at AI, said it's important to check how AI is made to make sure it's good for everyone. She said AI can make mistakes that hurt people who have been left out a lot.
Studies show that women often have problems with AI. For example, most fake videos online are about women without their permission.
NVIDIA's Market Value Surges by $1.6 Trillion in a Day, Lowers H20 Chip Prices
On May 23rd, NVIDIA shared how much money they made in the first part of 2025. They made $26.044 billion, which is a lot more, 262% more, than last year at this time. They also made $14.881 billion in profit, which is a huge jump, 628% more, than last year.
People who watch money stuff thought NVIDIA would do well, but NVIDIA did even better than they thought. This made NVIDIA's stock, which is like a piece of the company, go up a lot. On May 24th, it was worth over $1000, which is a 9.32% increase. NVIDIA also said they would split their stock 1 into 10 and give more money to people who own the stock, 150% more.
Now, NVIDIA is worth almost $2.55 trillion, which is a huge number.
A new company called Reuters said NVIDIA made their H20 computer chips cheaper for China. Now they cost less than Huawei's Ascend 910B chips.
TikTok plans big layoffs this week. They will remove the global user operations team.
On May 22nd, TikTok told employees about layoff plans. They will lay off many from operations and marketing teams. The exact number is not shared. However, a big part of 1000 global user operations, content, and marketing employees are affected.
Layoffs include removing the whole global user operations team. This team handles user support and communication. Remaining employees will be moved to other teams like trust and safety, marketing, content, and product. Based on company needs.
This is a big deal for TikTok. They rarely had such big layoffs before. Usually, they adjusted the workforce through performance reviews and small restructuring. But not all laid-off employees are from the US this week.
Microsoft Bing search had an outage. This affected other services like ChatGPT, Copilot, and DuckDuckGo.
On May 23rd afternoon, Bing search stopped working for unknown reasons. Many users on social media said they could not access Bing. They saw error codes. Some users see the old Bing logo sometimes. A panda picture popped up with messages like "It's not you, it's me" and "Bing is not here now, but will be back."
At first, users thought the problem was their computer or network. But as more reported the same issue, it was clear the outage was widespread. Because of Bing's outage, Microsoft's Copilot also had issues. Users could only use normal mode, and not see chat history. Reports said ChatGPT browser tools stopped working for hours due to Bing API interruption. Some services using Bing API like DuckDuckGo search were also offline for hours.
