Qwen's 93% Price Cut: Alibaba's Own Table Shows Gemini Gains More From Their Tooling

Original author：Compute Ledger

Original source：https://www.youtube.com/embed/EPPHBVwJ0Dk

Alibaba says audio-video input got over 93% cheaper. But the savings aren't the model — it learned to look less, and Gemini learns that same trick faster on the same tooling. In this video: 1. It's sold as an audio-video model, but subtract Gemini 3.8 Flash row by row and it dominates on audio while losing four vision rows — the vendor's own word is "approaching," not "surpassing" 2. {'Deep in the official blog sits a table the launch tweet never mentions': 'wire Gemini into Qwen Code and it gains 4.9 points and still scores higher. I cloned the repo to check — the capability is nine MCP retrieval tools over a prebuilt graph'} 3. One launch, four versions of the price cut (93% / 98% / 89% / 51.8%), with the methodology buried in footnotes; text pricing is labeled CNY in Chinese and USD in English, a 6.7x gap Chapters 00:00 Three price cuts 01:13 It's an audio model 03:05 Who earned the savings 07:42 Four numbers, one footnote If the gain lives in the orchestration layer, the model is a swappable part and the orchestration is the asset you keep. —— AI-assisted script, synthetic voice. Commentary. Every number here comes from Alibaba's official launch blog (qwen.ai, Chinese original) and the verified @Alibaba_Qwen launch post, read and cross-checked section by section in a real browser — that blog is client-rendered, so ordinary scrapers return nothing. The nine-tool MCP listing, the 5,572-line count and the source comment come from QwenLM/Qwen-MM-Plugins (Apache-2.0, commit bec9182), which I cloned and ran myself; the protocol tests pass with no API key and no GPU. Because the official pricing docs publish no figures (they tell you to check the console) and the Chinese and English versions label the price unit differently (CNY vs USD), this video quotes no absolute prices — only same-basis percentage drops. Sources: qwen.ai official blog; @Alibaba_Qwen post; github.com/QwenLM/Qwen-MM-Plugins; Alibaba Cloud Model Studio docs. Music: Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), CC BY 4.0. Footage: Pexels. Screenshots used for commentary. Credits - "Tech Live" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 https://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/licenses/ - Footage (Pexels — attribution not required, listed with thanks): Andrew Schwark, Anh Nguyen, Chandresh Uike, Ivan Chumak, Jakub Zerdzicki, La Doncella Audiovisual, Larkkid Dung, Ludovic Delot, Marc Espejo, MrColo, Nicola Narracci, Nottsflix (YouTube), Oleg Gamulinskii, Pachon in Motion, Phát Trương, Pressmaster, Rafael Minguet Delgado, Screenshot: @Alibaba_Qwen on X, Screenshot: @aisearchio on X, Sudhanshu Prajapati, fauxels, max laurell, setengah lima sore