Alibaba Says It Can Slash AI Training Costs By 90% With Newly Launched ZEROSEARCH — Here's What It Does

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. BABA has unveiled ZEROSEARCH, a groundbreaking framework designed to dramatically reduce training costs for large language models, potentially transforming the economics of artificial intelligence development.

What Happened: Alibaba Group announced on X that its new ZEROSEARCH technology can cut AI training costs by nearly 90%. The framework enables LLMs to simulate search behavior without making actual Application Programming Interface calls to search engines during the training process.

According to Alibaba’s technical report, ZEROSEARCH addresses two major challenges in traditional search-based AI training: uncontrolled document quality from real search engines and prohibitively high API costs during reinforcement learning training, which typically requires hundreds of thousands of search requests.

The framework works by first using lightweight supervised fine-tuning to transform a Large Language Model into a retrieval module that generates both useful and noisy documents. During reinforcement learning training, it employs a curriculum-based rollout strategy that gradually increases the difficulty of retrieval scenarios.

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Why It Matters: This development comes as Alibaba’s cloud division is upgrading its AI offerings globally, with expanded platform-as-a-service options and enhanced proprietary large language models, including Qwen-Max and QwQ-Plus reasoning model, according to Bloomberg reports.

The dramatic cost reduction could significantly impact the competitive landscape of AI development. Since January, when Chinese AI startup DeepSeek emerged with claims of outperforming OpenAI models at a fraction of their cost, Alibaba and peers have launched increasingly affordable business intelligence tools, with some costing just $1 per year for individual developers.

Alibaba released its Qwen 3 flagship model in April, continuing its aggressive push into AI under the leadership of Eddie Wu and Joe Tsai. The company’s stock has risen 48.77% year-to-date, adding more than $100 billion to its valuation, with Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives calling Alibaba the “best way to play China tech” due to its strong positioning in AI and cloud.

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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.