Baidu launches new AI model to keep itself ahead in the AI race

Amid mounting competition in the Chinese AI market, Chinese search engine giant Baidu launched its latest artificial intelligence model, Ernie 4.5 Turbo as it ramps up AI product offerings. It also launched its new reasoning model Ernie X1 Turbo which could incorporate its AI abilities across its apps from its cloud drive and content platform Baidu Wenku. Baidu CEO, Robin Li announced the launch and said that it matched the industry's best in several benchmark tests.

These improved versions are claimed to provide improved performance across multimodal understanding, logical reasoning, and tool usage, catering to developers, researchers, and companies alike.

The launch took place in China, with global availability expected soon through Baidu’s Qianfan platform and other cloud-based services. These Turbo models, which aim to make high-level AI more accessible, are also incredibly cost-efficient—ERNIE X1 Turbo costs only $0.14 per 1 million input tokens and $0.55 per 1 million output tokens, which is roughly 25% less than DeepSeek R1, according to Baidu.

These enhancements are made possible by advancements in chain-of-thought reasoning, enhanced multimodal capabilities, and improved tool integration, positioning ERNIE X1 Turbo and 4.5 Turbo in strong contention for the most efficient and intelligent AI systems on the market today.

AI race in China

Baidu was notably among the first in China to launch a ChatGPT-style chatbot in early 2023, with Ernie 4.0 which apparently rivaled OpenAI’s GPT-4. However, since then adoption has lagged due to strong competition, especially from DeepSeek’s R1.

Also read: Baidu plans to come up with AI chatbot similar to ChatGPT