On March 16, 2025, Baidu made waves in the AI world by rolling out its latest innovations: ERNIE 4.5 and ERNIE X1. If you’re eager to get your hands on cutting-edge AI technology, you’re in luck. Baidu is offering early access to these models through the ERNIE Bot platform, weeks ahead of schedule. This move underscores Baidu’s commitment to making AI more accessible and enhancing its range of AI-powered services.
ERNIE 4.5 is a standout multimodal foundation model that’s skilled at handling various types of data, from text and images to audio and video. It shines in language comprehension, generation, and reasoning, and it’s also great at minimizing issues like hallucinations. Thanks to innovations like “FlashMask” Dynamic Attention Masking and a Heterogeneous Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts, ERNIE 4.5 delivers stellar performance. It’s even outperforming OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 at just 1% of the cost, with token input prices as low as RMB 0.004 per thousand.
ERNIE X1, on the other hand, is Baidu’s foray into deep-thinking AI, excelling in complex reasoning tasks such as Chinese knowledge Q&A and manuscript creation. It comes equipped with tools for applications like image analysis and code interpretation. Built on advanced methodologies like Progressive Reinforcement Learning, ERNIE X1 offers performance that’s on par with DeepSeek R1, but at half the price.
Here’s what Baidu Inc. had to say: “We’ve just unveiled ERNIE 4.5 & X1! 🚀 As a deep-thinking reasoning model with multimodal capabilities, ERNIE X1 delivers performance on par with DeepSeek R1 at only half the price. Meanwhile, ERNIE 4.5 is our latest foundation model and new-generation native multimodal model…”
Both models are freely accessible to individual users via the ERNIE Bot website. Businesses and developers can find ERNIE 4.5 on Baidu AI Cloud’s Qianfan platform, with ERNIE X1’s release just around the corner. These models are set to integrate into Baidu’s ecosystem, enhancing services like Baidu Search and the Wenxiaoyan app. With these latest offerings, Baidu is positioning itself as a formidable player in the AI sector, providing high-quality, cost-effective alternatives to competitors like OpenAI.
