Baidu launched two new AI models, ERNIE 4.5, which is the acronym for Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration, and ERNIE X1, on Sunday, 16 March. It is said that ERNIE 4.5 has excellent multimodal understanding and advanced language ability, and its logic and memory abilities have improved dramatically from the earlier models. This is huge in terms of China’s capabilities to create such AI models at such a fast pace and a fraction of the cost of other AI models. The world is rapidly changing as the race to advance in AI tools is highly intense.
ERNIE 4.5 rivals DeepSeek R1, while the expenditures are halved. Not too long ago, DeepSeek created one of the biggest disruptions in AI models. Released in January 2025, it jolted the world by showing similar performance to the leading United States counterparts like ChatGPT, that too, at a fraction of the cost of those models.
Baidu has posted on X a video showing a query asked from its model. The query is asked by uploading a video of a street food being prepared and asking,
“What are they making in the video, give me a detailed recipe”
ERNIE 4.5 answered it in detail almost instantly. They proudly Said,
We’ve just unveiled ERNIE 4.5 & X1!
They said;
“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. Plus, our AI chatbot ERNIE Bot has now been made free to individual users ahead of schedule. Both models are now freely accessible to all ERNIE Bot users via its official website: https://yiyan.baidu.com.”
The question now is, what will the impact of Chinese censorship be as they progress toward launching the Bot next month? China’s AI chip companies are still solving the riddle of supporting the deployment of the DeepSeek Model. China AI Newsletter has critically analyzed the situation and said 20 companies are rushing to claim that they can provide the support to DeepSeek but the question remains if the chips can run the full-parameter version or just the distilled version?
While it is being solved, the other tech companies like Baidu are not coming slow for training more models. Baidu is still facing many challenges regarding having enough material in Chinese to train their models, as a lot of high-quality content is available in English. There are looming questions, but ERNIE 4.5 is riding on the waves created by DeepSeek in the market.
Baidu released its first model back in 2019 but has struggled to build a solid user base around the world because of China’s censorship and the dominance of US models. Things changed after DeepSeek made a big splash in the market earlier this year. It seems that with Baidu’s timely release, more users will be interested in its latest AI models.
