Chinese tech giant Baidu has launched two new AI models, Ernie X1 and Ernie 4.5, claiming their performance rivals that of competitors OpenAI and DeepSeek while offering lower costs. The announcement was made on Saturday, ahead of a previously planned release.
Baidu’s new AI models challenge OpenAI and DeepSeek
Ernie X1 is described as a reasoning model that delivers performance on par with DeepSeek R1 at half the cost. Baidu’s multimodal foundation model, Ernie 4.5, reportedly outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 in multiple benchmarks and is priced at just 1% of its competitor. Baidu’s chatbot, Ernie Bot, is set to become free to the public on April 1, 2025, earlier than expected.
The integration of Ernie X1 and Ernie 4.5 into Baidu’s product ecosystem, including Baidu Search, is planned to occur progressively. Baidu’s latest releases come as Silicon Valley evaluates the costs associated with AI models, significantly influenced by recent offerings from DeepSeek, a Chinese startup backed by the hedge fund High Flyer.
DeepSeek introduced its large language model V3 in December and a reasoning model, R1, in January. These models are considered on par or superior to equivalent models from OpenAI but are priced “anywhere from 20-40x cheaper,” according to Bernstein Research analysis.
Baidu has provided pricing details for Ernie 4.5, stating that input token prices start at 0.004 Chinese yuan per thousand tokens, while output token prices begin at 0.016 per thousand tokens. Converting these figures to USD reveals Ernie 4.5’s costs align with Baidu’s claims against OpenAI’s GPT-4.5, while DeepSeek’s V3 slightly edges out Ernie 4.5 in pricing comparisons. In the reasoning category, Ernie X1 is the most affordable, costing under 2% of OpenAI’s pricing for similar models.
Early users of Ernie have provided positive feedback. Alvin Foo, a venture partner at Zero2Launch, remarked, “Been playing around with it for hours, impressive performance,” in a post on X.
Baidu’s new models underscore the escalating competition in the AI sector between the United States and China, highlighting China’s increasing inclination toward open-source solutions. Robin Li, Baidu’s CEO, noted during an earnings call that “open-sourcing the best models can greatly help adoption,” emphasizing that curiosity drives users to try open-source models.
Baidu announced via X in February that the Ernie 4.5 series would be open-sourced starting June 30, 2025. The company declined to comment on the open-source status of the Ernie X1 model.
In addition to Baidu’s developments, China aims to establish itself as a global AI leader by 2030, with various models and agents emerging from new players, including Alibaba’s open-source model QwQ-32B and AI agent Manus, recently released.
Featured image credit: Kerem Gülen/Midjourney
