Baidu delivers new LLMs ERNIE 4.5 and ERNIE X1 undercutting DeepSeek, OpenAI on cost — but they’re not open source (yet)
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Summary
Chinese internet company, Baidu, has released two new AI models, ERNIE 4.5 and ERNIE X1, a multimodal language model and a reasoning model respectively.
Baidu has indicated that its reasoning model, ERNIE X1, has best-in-class performance on a number of metrics including C-Eval, CMMLU, and GSM8K.
It is also significantly cheaper than competitors’ products; it costs 50% less than DeepSeek’s R1 and 99% less than Open AI’s GPT-4.5.
However, it only holds 5,000 tokens in its context window, which is significantly lower than competitors, which typically have windows of around 128,000 tokens.
Both models have been enabled via Baidu’s API and its Chinese-language ChatGPT rival, ERNIE Bot.