Baidu launches new AI models, touts superiority to DeepSeek, OpenAI on benchmarks

Chinese technology giant Baidu released two new artificial intelligence (AI) models that it touted as stronger than those of DeepSeek and OpenAI based on certain benchmarks, as the large language model (LLM) competition continues to heat up.

Baidu made its latest multimodal foundational model Ernie 4.5 and its first multimodal reasoning model Ernie X1 freely available on its website on Sunday.

Ernie 4.5’s multimodal capabilities, which cover images, audio and video, outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-4o on several benchmark platforms including CCBench and OCRBench, Baidu said in a statement posted on WeChat. The Ernie 4.5 foundational model’s text capabilities also surpassed that of DeepSeek V3 based on several benchmarks, and roughly matched US firm OpenAI’s GPT-4.5, the company said.

Baidu was the first Chinese Big Tech firm to launch an LLM in China in March 2023 following the frenzy created by the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But its early-mover advantage was challenged by China’s other AI players in the last two years. The search giant’s latest move to increase its relevance in China’s AI market came as DeepSeek has fanned an open-source wave, with Alibaba, Tencent and Bytedance galloping ahead in grabbing business and consumer users for their models.

Baidu did not provide benchmark results for its new reasoning model Ernie X1, but said that it “delivers performance on par with DeepSeek R1 at only half the price”.

Pricing for business access to Ernie X1’s application programming interface (API) is set at 2 yuan (US$0.28) per million token inputs and 8 yuan per million token outputs, the company said.

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Xinmei Shen

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