Baidu has launched its newest basis AI fashions, ERNIE 4.5 and ERNIE X1, and is providing them free for people by means of ERNIE Bot.
The corporate says that it goals to “push the boundaries of multimodal and reasoning fashions” by offering superior capabilities at a extra accessible worth level. Baidu plans to combine these fashions into its broader product ecosystem, together with Baidu Search and the Wenxiaoyan app, to boost person experiences.
ERNIE 4.5, Baidu’s “new era native multimodal basis mannequin,” options collaborative optimisation throughout a number of modalities, leading to improved multimodal comprehension. It enhances language understanding, era, reasoning, and reminiscence, whereas additionally bettering “hallucination prevention, logical reasoning, and coding skills.”
A key function of ERNIE 4.5 is its capacity to combine and perceive varied content material sorts, together with textual content, photographs, audio, and video. It will probably additionally grasp complicated content material resembling web memes and satirical cartoons, showcasing sturdy contextual consciousness.
Baidu claims ERNIE 4.5 outperforms GPT-4.5 in a number of benchmarks whereas being considerably extra inexpensive, priced at “simply 1% of GPT-4.5.”

The mannequin’s developments are attributed to applied sciences like ‘FlashMask’ dynamic consideration masking, heterogeneous multimodal mixture-of-experts, spatiotemporal illustration compression, knowledge-centric coaching knowledge development, and self-feedback enhanced post-training.
ERNIE X1, Baidu’s new deep-thinking reasoning mannequin, focuses on enhanced understanding, planning, reflection, and evolution. As Baidu’s “first multimodal deep-thinking reasoning mannequin able to device use,” X1 excels in areas like Chinese language information Q&A, literary creation, and complicated calculations.
The mannequin’s device use consists of options like superior search, doc Q&A, picture understanding, AI picture era, and webpage studying.
ERNIE X1’s capabilities are supported by applied sciences such because the progressive reinforcement studying technique, end-to-end coaching strategy integrating chains of thought and motion, and a unified multi-faceted reward system.
For enterprise customers and builders, ERNIE 4.5 is accessible by means of APIs on Baidu AI Cloud’s Qianfan platform, with aggressive pricing buildings. ERNIE X1 will quickly be accessible on the identical platform.
Baidu anticipates that “2025 is about to be an necessary yr for the event and iteration of enormous language fashions and applied sciences” and plans to proceed investing in AI, knowledge centres, and cloud infrastructure to advance its AI capabilities and develop next-generation fashions.
See additionally: OpenAI and Google name for US authorities motion to safe AI lead

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