Baidu delivers new LLMs ERNIE 4.5 and ERNIE X1 undercutting DeepSeek, OpenAI on cost — but they’re not open source (yet)

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Over the weekend, Chinese web search giant Baidu announced the launch of two new AI models, ERNIE 4.5 and ERNIE X1, a multimodal language model and reasoning model, respectively. Baidu claims they offer state-of-the-art performance on a variety of metrics, besting DeepSeek’s non-reasoning V3 and OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 (how do you like the close name match Baidu chose as well?) on several third-party benchmark tests such as the C-Eval (assessing Chinese LLM performance on knowledge and reasoning across 52 subjects), CMMLU (massive multitask language understanding in Chinese), and GSM8K (math word problems). It also claims to undercut the cost of both fellow Chinese wunderkind’s DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model with ERNIE X1 by 50% and US AI juggernaut OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 with ERNIE 4.5 by 99%, respectively. Yet both have some important limitations, including a lack of o ... Read full article.