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
And Costs Half As Much: ‘Excellent Multimodal Understanding Ability’ Nisha Gopalan / Yahoo Finance : China's Baidu Takes on DeepSeek With New AI Model Mike Wheatley / SiliconANGLE : Baidu debuts its first AI reasoning model to compete with DeepSeek Lauren Almeida / The Times : Tech firm Baidu unveils DeepSeek competitor in AI launch Juro Osawa / The Information : Baidu Launches New AI Reasoning Model in Challenge to DeepSeek Alexey Shabanov / TestingCatalog : Baidu unveils ERNIE 4.5 and ERNIE X1, challenging DeepSeek with lower prices Diya Lal / Tech in Asia : Baidu launches two new AI models for text, reasoning tasks Abdullah Mustapha / Gizchina.com : Baidu Introduces Upgraded AI Models: Ernie 4.5 and Ernie X1 Tech Xplore : China's Baidu releases new AI model to compete with DeepSeek Daily Sabah : China's Baidu releases 2 new AI models amid growing competition Matthias Bastian / The Decoder : Baidu claims its Ernie X1 reasoning model matches Deepseek-R1 performance at half the price Siddharth Jindal / Analytics India Magazine : China's Baidu Launches Two New AI Models, Rivals DeepSeek R1 at Half the Price Farah Master / BusinessLIVE : China's Baidu launches two AI models amid rising competition Xinmei Shen / South China Morning Post : Baidu launches new AI models, touts superiority to DeepSeek, OpenAI on benchmarks Reuters : China's Baidu launches two new AI models as industry competition heats up Bluesky: Karsten Lemm / @lemmk : We need an AI that keeps track of all the AI model names. — Also: Ernie? Is Bert next? [embedded post] X: @baidu_inc : 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. [video] Bill Gurley / @bgurley : 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. @baidu_inc : 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] Bindu Reddy / @bindureddy : The simplest way for the US to maintain our lead in AI is to go all-in on open source! Open source amplifies our technology and frameworks worldwide You can also continue to make money on value-added services @zephyr_z9 : Tencent and Baidu are moving too slow Bytedance, Qwen, Deepseek, Moonshot, Zhipu are training their next gen reasoner and base model @ananayarora : It's an insane pricing war at this point, but ERNIE isn't cheaper in all cases. In comparison to DeepSeek v3, ERNIE 4.5 costs almost double, but ERNIE X1 is half the cost of DeepSeek R1. [image] Min Choi / @minchoi : China just kicked off an AI price war 🤯 Baidu dropped ERNIE 4.5 at 1% GPT-4.5 price, X1 half DeepSeek R1. AI just got crazy cheap. Here's what's happening: 👇 [image] Li Zexin / @xh_lee23 : 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. Jasper / @zjasper666 : AI models are getting commoditized quickly. We're entering the era when everyone has access to the best AI without paying $200/month. Steve Hou / @stevehou0 : “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. Gavriel Cohen / @gavriel_cohen : 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. Jeffrey Emanuel / @doodlestein : 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. @kimmonismus : 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 @baidu_inc : 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, Robert Scoble / @scobleizer : @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. Robert Scoble / @scobleizer : Here it is. Half the price of @deepseek_ai's R1. We have an AI price war folks! @business : 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/... @baidu_inc : @verioussmith We've announced our plan to open source the ERNIE 4.5 model series in the next few months! https://x.com/... @baidu_inc : 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!