On Sunday, Baidu unveiled two new types of artificial intelligence (AI). The Ernie X1 is a reasoning-focused model, whereas the Ernie 4.5 is a foundation model that replaces the company’s prior version.
The well-known AI business with a solid Internet base, was unveiled today. These models include the deep-thinking reasoning model ERNIE X1 and the native multimodal foundation model ERNIE 4.5. Individual users can now freely access both models via the official ERNIE Bot website.
The large language model (LLM) in the latter is also the Chinese tech giant’s first attempt at a “deep-thinking” AI model, and according to Baidu, it performs similarly to the DeepSeek-R1. Baidu has made its AI platform Ernie Bot available for free in conjunction with the model releases, so customers won’t need to pay extra to utilize the chatbot.
By providing cutting-edge features at a more affordable price, the release of ERNIE 4.5 and ERNIE X1 represents a major turning point in the development of multimodal and reasoning models. It also demonstrates Baidu’s resolve to keep funding the creation of more intelligent and potent next-generation foundation models.
The Chinese tech giant introduced the two new AI models in a news statement. According to the firm, the Ernie X1 will be available shortly, but as of right now, only the Ernie 4.5 model is offered through the chatbot platform. AI firms usually release new models along with a research paper and repository (if open-source), but Baidu didn’t do either.
The company said that the Ernie 4.5 would be made accessible to developers on June 30th, along with the model weights and source code. Regarding the reasoning model, no such announcement has been made.
Additionally, Baidu intends to gradually incorporate X1 and ERNIE 4.5 into its product ecosystem. Baidu Search, the Wenxiaoyan app, and other services will be integrated as part of this, giving a wider range of individual users a more flexible and improved experience.
Text, pictures, music, and video may all be understood by the natively multimodal AI model Ernie 4.5. This implies that people can ask the AI questions about these file types by uploading them as input. Additionally, the business stated that the model’s language skills are being improved, allowing it to reply more effectively to reasoning and memory-based questions as well as conversational messaging. Additionally, Ernie 4.5 is able to comprehend contextual information like satire and memes.
Regarding performance, Baidu asserted that their most recent base model, which costs 1% of GPT-4.5, beats GPT-4.5 on a number of benchmarks. The company’s internal testing serves as the foundation for the performance measures. Ernie 4.5 is accessible through application programming interfaces on Quianfan, the MaaS platform of Baidu AI Cloud, in addition to the AI platform.
Regarding pricing, Baidu stated that the output prices for Ernie 4.5 are fixed at 0.0022 USD, while the input costs begin at 0.00055 USD per thousand tokens.
Regarding Ernie X1, the business said that the multimodal thinking model is capable of using tools and performs exceptionally well in areas including conversation, logical reasoning, complicated arithmetic, literary creativity, manuscript writing, and Chinese knowledge Q&A. Advanced search, picture comprehension, document comprehension, image creation, code interpretation, webpage reading, TreeMind mapping, and more are among the techniques it provides.
Regarding performance, Baidu asserted that their most recent base model, which costs 1% of GPT-4.5, beats GPT-4.5 on a number of benchmarks. The company’s internal testing serves as the foundation for the performance measures. Ernie 4.5 is accessible through application programming interfaces on Quianfan, the MaaS platform of Baidu AI Cloud, in addition to the AI platform.
According to the business, a unified multifaceted reward system, end-to-end training, and progressive reinforcement learning (RL) were used to train its initial reasoning model. It also has a visual chain of thought (CoT), similar to DeepSeek-R1.
Although Ernie X1 is not yet accessible on the Quianfan Platform, its input and output pricing will be maintained at 0.00028 USD and 0.0011 USD per thousand tokens, respectively, upon its availability.
Baidu was founded in 2000 with the goal of using technology to simplify the complex environment. A prominent AI business with a solid online base, Baidu is listed on the NASDAQ under the ticker “BIDU” and the HKEX under the ticker “9888.” Eight Class A ordinary shares are represented by one Baidu ADS.
Discover more from TechBooky
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.