Baidu releases Ernie X1, an AI model that articulates its reasoning similarly to DeepSeek R1, and upgrades its flagship foundation model to Ernie 4.5, both free
The Ernie X1 model by China's internet search leader works similarly to DeepSeek R1 — which shocked Silicon Valley …
The pairing matters because it puts a reasoning model and a flagship foundation model into the market together, rather than treating advanced reasoning as a separately gated capability.
First-order effects
Developers and users can access Baidu's Ernie X1 and Ernie 4.5 without a price barrier, while Baidu broadens the appeal of its Ernie portfolio beyond its prior model upgrades.
Baidu directly positions its reasoning offering against DeepSeek R1-style capabilities, making reasoning quality a visible dimension of competition among Chinese AI platforms.
Second-order effects
Rival model providers face greater pressure to differentiate on capability, distribution, or access terms when Baidu offers both a general-purpose flagship and a reasoning model for free.
Enterprise and developer buyers gain more leverage in model selection: they can evaluate advanced reasoning alongside foundation-model performance before committing to paid services or integrations.
Third-order effects
If free access to frontier-style models persists, model providers may find it harder to use base-model access as the primary monetization layer and may compete more through distribution, integrations, and higher-value services.
The release is part of a shift toward reasoning capability becoming a standard feature of model portfolios rather than a premium niche; the durability of that shift depends on whether providers can sustain the underlying serving costs.
The trend:China's AI-model race is moving toward bundled, low-friction access to both general-purpose and reasoning capabilities, increasing buyer power and shifting differentiation beyond the base model.
We've just unveiled ERNIE 4.5 & X1! 🚀 As a deep-thinking reasoning model with multimodal capabilities, ERNIE X1 delivers performance on par with DeepSeek R1 at only half the price. Meanwhile, ERNIE 4.5 is our latest foundation model and new-generation native multimodal model. [vi…
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 [image…
The success of Deepseek has spurred Chinese tech companies to race for more powerful yet cheap AI models. This fierce homegrown competition could end up fueling China's AI innovation so fast that Europe and the US might struggle to keep up.
“ERNIE X1 delivers performance on par with DeepSeek R1 at only half the price.” It's like solar panels, but for AI models. China doesn't stop grinding and the floor is the limit.
Despite the name implying it—this is not a GPT 4.5 level model. The second tweet in the thread compares ERNIE-4.5 to GPT-4.5 across 15 benchmarks and shows that ERNIE-4.5 scores an average of 79.6 vs 79.14 for GPT-4.5. Problem is the benchmarks in the average are cherry-picked.
These announcements are coming at a wild rate now. By open sourcing so much of its very clever work, DeepSeek has dramatically accelerated AI research for China and the rest of the world. And a bit of competitive rivalry among China' tech giants probably didn't hurt, either.
US AI companies should spend 100% of their time developing and innovating vs hanging out in DC begging for protection from competition. It's a bad look that unveils a clear lack of self confidence.
China killed it: GPT-4.5 niveau for 1% of its price! Ernie 4.5 Just a few months ago, I wouldn't have thought that possible. But China is overtaking the USA in some areas, such as price-performance ratio. Ernie 4.5, Baidou's LLM, achieves comparable quality in the well-known
@UziObi_ ... Reinforcement learning is getting better I hear. Plus China is playing big pricing games. Baidu is gonna use these models to make all its services more profitable.
For enterprise users and developers, ERNIE 4.5 is now accessible via APIs on Baidu AI Cloud's MaaS platform Qianfan, while ERNIE X1 is set to be available on the platform soon. ERNIE 4.5: Input and output prices start as low as $0.55 per 1M tokens and $2.2 per 1M tokens,
China's Baidu released a new artificial intelligence model that articulates its reasoning, in an apparent bid to regain momentum against up-and-coming rivals like DeepSeek. https://www.bloomberg.com/...
For individual users, we're also planning to expand the integration of ERNIE 4.5 and X1 across Baidu's ecosystem, including Baidu Search, the Wenxiaoyan APP, and other offerings. Stay tuned!