Chinese technology company Baidu has released two new language models, bringing more competition to the rapidly changing field of AI development.
Baidu, which owns the biggest search engine in China, has unveiled Ernie X1, its first model capable of reasoning.
The company claims X1’s performance is “on par with DeepSeek R1” at only half the price, though it didn’t provide any details to back up its claims.
Baidu says that the X1 excels in tasks like Chinese knowledge Q&A, literary creation, manuscript writing, dialogue, logical reasoning, and complex calculations.
The company has also unveiled another model, Ernie 4.5, which is an improvement over Ernie 4.0, which the company released last year. Ernie 4.5 is now multimodal and can understand images, texts, videos, and audio and “possesses strong intelligence and contextual awareness.”
Baidu claims that Ernie 4.5 surpasses OpenAI’s 4.5 in multiple text-related benchmarks.
ERNIE 4.5 achieves collaborative optimization through joint modeling of multiple modalities, exhibiting comprehensive improvements in understanding, generation, reasoning and memory, along with notable enhancements in hallucination prevention, logical reasoning, and coding… pic.twitter.com/8Iu3pmpMtV
undefined Baidu Inc. (@Baidu_Inc) March 16, 2025
The company plans to integrate both Ernie 4.5 and the X1 into its product ecosystem, including Baidu Search, soon.
In February, Baidu announced that it would make its Ernie family of models open source.
Months before the release of the latest DeepSeek models, Baidu’s Ernie bot was seen as a Chinese alternative to ChatGPT. The previous version of its bot, Ernie bot 4.0, built on the company’s Ernie LLM, topped the Chinese LLMs list last year.
However, the company struggled to keep up with local competitors including DeepSeek’s R1 and Alibaba’s Qwen models.
Last week, Alibaba released QwQ-32B, its 32 billion-parameter open-source model that can be run on a powerful desktop computer. Despite its small size, it delivers strong performance.
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