With the launch of R1, Deepseek not only created a shock wave in Silicon Valley but intensified competition within the Empire of the Middle. Last February, Baidu, a major Chinese actor from the Genai, holder of the eponymous search engine, retaliated with the announcement of the open source bet next June of his IA Ernie model as well as the free of his Chatbot Ernie Bot. He put the double bites since yesterday he published Ernie 4.5, the latest version of his multimodal foundation model, but also Ernie X1, a reasoning model, offering performance comparable to R1, but at half price. Both are integrated into Ernie Bot, who in fact, is free a little earlier than expected.
According to Baidu, Ernie 4.5 incorporates significant advances in understanding, generation, reasoning and memory. It benefits in particular from better management of hallucinations and optimization of logical reasoning. Its ability to simultaneously process text, images, sound and video makes it a powerful tool for various applications, ranging from dialogue to content creation.
The improvements made to the model are allocated to several key technologies, in particular the dynamic masking of “flashmask” attention, the heterogeneous multimodal mixture of experts, the compression of space-time representation, the construction of training data centered on knowledge, improved post-training self-training.
In its press release, the company states that Erennie 4.5 surpasses GPT-4.5 in several benchmarks, while being 100 times less expensive.
For her part, Ernie X1, focused on multimodal reasoning and the use of advanced tools, would excel in planning, analysis and resolution of complex problems. It incorporates specific features such as advanced research, generation and interpretation of images, reading web pages as well as conceptual cartography via TreeMind.
A bet on accessibility and competitiveness
By making these free models for the general public and by offering competitive prices for companies via its QIANFAN Cloud platform, BAIDU seeks to strengthen its influence in the AI ecosystem. Ernie 4.5 is thus offered at 0.004 RMB (approximately 0.0005 euros) per thousand chips as a starter and 0.016 RMB (approximately 0.002 euros) at the exit, while ERNIE X1 displays even lower prices: it is offered at 0.002 RMB (approximately 0.00025 Euro) for the same number of entry tokens and 0.008 RMB (approximately 0.001 euro) out.
This aggressive tariff positioning is accompanied by a desire to democratize the generative AI, while gradually integrating these models into the products and services of Baidu, in particular its search engine and the Wenxiaoyan application.
By offering a model with performance comparable to R1, but at half price, Baidu clearly displays its ambition to dominate the sector not only in China but also against American players.