Chinese search engine Baidu launches two new AI models – Ernie 4.5, the latest version of the company’s basic model First released two years agoand the new inference model Ernie X1.
According to ReutersBaidu claims that the Ernie X1’s performance is “compared with the DeepSeek R1 for only half the price” and that it touts the Ernie 4.5’s “High Eq”, allowing the model to understand memes and irony. Both models have multimodal capabilities, allowing them to process video, images and audio, as well as text.
Baidu was one of the first Chinese companies to launch a competitor, but it has reportedly been struggling to find a wide range of adoptions. Meanwhile, the recently mentioned DeepSeek Unsolved American AI companies Investors are much cheaper by publishing models that seem to be equally powerful.
Previous report by CNBC Baidu plans to release its next-generation modelErnie 5, later this year, further multimodal improvements.