Baidu unveiled two new artificial intelligence (AI) models on Sunday, marking a significant advancement in its AI technology. The first model, named Ernie 4.5, builds upon its predecessor, while the second, Ernie X1, is designed specifically for reasoning tasks. This new model is Baidu’s inaugural foray into what it describes as “deep-thinking” AI, and the company asserts that the large language model (LLM) performs comparably to the DeepSeek-R1 model. Additionally, Baidu has announced that its AI platform, Ernie Bot, will be free for users, eliminating any associated costs with the chatbot’s usage.
Baidu Introduces New Ernie AI Models
In a press release, Baidu detailed the launch of the new models. Currently, Ernie 4.5 is accessible via the chatbot platform, with Ernie X1 expected to be available shortly. Unlike typical releases from AI companies that often include a research paper and a repository, Baidu did not provide either alongside this announcement.
The company has indicated that Ernie 4.5 will be open-sourced on June 30. Developers can look forward to the availability of the model’s source code and weights, although no such commitment has been made regarding the reasoning-focused model.
Ernie 4.5 is a multimodal AI model capable of processing text, images, audio, and video inputs. Users can submit various file formats and pose questions to the AI based on them. Baidu noted enhancements to the model’s conversational abilities, improving its responses to dialogue, reasoning, and memory-related queries. Furthermore, Ernie 4.5 is equipped to comprehend contextual nuances, including memes and satire.
Benchmark scores for Ernie 4.5
Photo Credit: Baidu
Regarding its performance, Baidu claims that Ernie 4.5 surpasses GPT-4.5 in various testing benchmarks while being priced significantly lower at just one percent of the cost of GPT-4.5. These performance metrics are drawn from the company’s internal evaluations. In addition to being available on the AI platform, Ernie 4.5 is also accessible through application programming interfaces via Baidu AI Cloud’s MaaS platform, Quianfan.
In terms of pricing, Baidu has set the input rates for Ernie 4.5 at CNY 0.004 (approximately Rs. 0.04) per thousand tokens and the output rates at CNY 0.016 (around Rs. 0.19) per thousand tokens.
Concerning Ernie X1, Baidu promotes this multimodal reasoning model for its advanced capabilities, including tool usage and exceptional performance in tasks such as Chinese knowledge Q&A, creative writing, manuscript generation, dialogue, logical reasoning, and complex mathematical calculations. Its supported features include various advanced functionalities like image understanding, document comprehension, image generation, code interpretation, webpage reading, and mind mapping.
This reasoning model was developed using progressive reinforcement learning (RL), employing an end-to-end training method coupled with a comprehensive reward system. Similar to DeepSeek-R1, Ernie X1 also presents a visible chain of thought (CoT).
Although Ernie X1 is not yet available on the Quianfan Platform, once launched, its pricing is expected to be CNY 0.002 (around Rs. 0.02) for input and CNY 0.008 (approximately Rs. 0.09) per thousand tokens for output.
