Baidu Releases Two New AI Models to Compete in Intensifying Market

The Chinese tech giant's Ernie 4.5 and X1 models claim advanced multimodal and reasoning capabilities at competitive costs.

Baidu unveiled its multimodal Ernie 4.5 foundational model and X1 reasoning model, both available for free via its Ernie Bot platform.
Ernie 4.5 outperformed OpenAI's GPT-4o and matched GPT-4.5 on several benchmarks, while its text capabilities surpassed DeepSeek V3.
The X1 reasoning model reportedly delivers performance comparable to DeepSeek R1 but at half the cost, with pricing set at 2 yuan per million token inputs and 8 yuan per million token outputs.
Baidu plans to follow DeepSeek's open-source strategy by making its Ernie models open-source starting June 30, 2025.
The release highlights Baidu's efforts to regain ground in China's competitive AI market, where rivals like Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance have gained traction.