Baidu launched two new synthetic intelligence (AI) fashions on Sunday. First, the Ernie 4.5 is a basis mannequin that succeeds the corporate’s earlier era, whereas the second, Ernie X1, is a reasoning-focused mannequin. The latter can also be the Chinese language tech large’s first try at a “deep-thinking” AI mannequin, and Baidu claims that the massive language mannequin (LLM) performs on-par with the DeepSeek-R1. Alongside the mannequin releases, Baidu additionally made its AI platform Ernie Bot free to entry, and customers is not going to must pay a premium to make use of the chatbot.
Baidu Releases New Ernie AI Fashions
In a press release, the Chinese language tech large introduced the discharge of the 2 new AI fashions. At present, solely the Ernie 4.5 mannequin has been launched and is accessible through the chatbot platform, and the corporate stated that the Ernie X1 can be obtainable quickly. Sometimes, AI corporations introduce new fashions with a analysis paper and repository (in the event that they’re open-source), nevertheless, Baidu didn’t launch both.
The corporate highlighted that the Ernie 4.5 can be open-sourced on June 30 with supply code and mannequin weights made obtainable to builders. No such announcement has been made concerning the reasoning mannequin.
Ernie 4.5 is a natively multimodal AI mannequin with the power to know textual content, photos, audio, and movies. This implies customers can add these file codecs as enter and ask the AI queries about them. The corporate additionally stated that the language capabilities of the mannequin are being enhanced and it might probably now higher reply to conversational messages in addition to reasoning and memory-based queries. Ernie 4.5 may also perceive contextual content material equivalent to memes, satire, and others.
Ernie 4.5 benchmark scores
Picture Credit score: Baidu
As for efficiency, Baidu claimed that its newest basis mannequin outperforms GPT-4.5 throughout numerous benchmarks, and is priced at one p.c of GPT-4.5. The efficiency metrics are based mostly on the corporate’s inner testing. Aside from the AI platform, Ernie 4.5 can also be obtainable through software programming interfaces on Baidu AI Cloud’s MaaS platform Quianfan.
On pricing, Baidu stated that Ernie 4.5 enter costs begin at CNY 0.004 (roughly Rs. 0.04) per thousand tokens, and the output costs are set at CNY 0.016 (roughly Rs. 0.19) per thousand tokens.
Coming to Ernie X1, the corporate claimed that the multimodal reasoning mannequin comes with the potential of software use and excels in parameters equivalent to Chinese language data Q&A, literary creation, manuscript writing, dialogue, logical reasoning, and complicated arithmetic. A few of the instruments it helps embrace superior search, picture understanding, doc understanding, picture era, code interpretation, webpage studying, TreeMind mapping, and extra.
The corporate stated that its first reasoning mannequin was educated utilizing progressive reinforcement studying (RL), an end-to-end coaching strategy, and a unified multi-faceted reward system. Identical to DeepSeek-R1, it additionally comes with a visual chain of thought (CoT).
Whereas Ernie X1 just isn’t obtainable on the Quianfan Platform, as soon as it’s launched, its enter costs can be stored at CNY 0.002 (roughly Rs. 0.02) and output costs at CNY 0.008 (roughly Rs. 0.09) per thousand tokens, respectively.
About The Author
