China's largest search portal company Baidu has unveiled two new artificial intelligence (AI) models. According to foreign reports, including Reuters, on the 16th (local time), Baidu announced the reasoning model "Ernie X1" and the large language model "Ernie 4.5."
According to Baidu, Ernie X1 has performance comparable to or surpassing DeepSeek while reducing the usage fee to half. Another model, Ernie 4.5, has enhanced hallucination prevention features and, according to Baidu, has outperformed OpenAI's GPT-4.5 in some benchmarks. However, the usage fee is only one-hundredth of that of GPT-4.5, underscoring its competitiveness.
Ernie 4.5 can understand commands and generate various content, including text, images, voice, and video. Baidu plans to integrate these models into its AI ecosystem, including search engines and AI chatbots.
Baidu has positioned itself as a leader in the generative AI field since 2023, but it is currently lagging behind ByteDance (the parent company of TikTok) and the AI startup Moonshot in terms of user numbers. Accordingly, this announcement of AI models is interpreted as a strategy to recover market competitiveness.