Baidu released a new artificial intelligence (AI) model that articulates its reasoning, in an apparent bid to regain momentum against up-and-coming rivals such as DeepSeek.
The Ernie X1 model by China’s Internet search leader works similarly to DeepSeek R1 – which shocked Silicon Valley by offering comparable performance to the world’s best chatbots at a fraction of their development cost. Baidu’s reasoning model excels in areas such as daily dialogues, complex calculations and logical deduction, it said in a statement on Sunday (Mar 16).
Baidu also upgraded its flagship foundation model to Ernie 4.5. It immediately made all tiers of its service – including the X1 model – free for its chatbot users, several weeks than earlier previously planned.
The Beijing-based company was the first in China’s trillion-dollar tech sector to launch a chatbot modelled after OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but rival chatbots from ByteDance and Moonshot AI soon took over in popularity. Open-sourced models such as Alibaba’s Qwen and then DeepSeek gained greater recognition within the global developer community.
Ernie 4.5 outperforms OpenAI’s latest GPT 4.5 in text generation, Baidu said, citing several industry benchmarks.
Baidu has declared that it will make Ernie AI models open-source from Jun 30, representing a major strategic shift post the rise of DeepSeek. It also integrated the R1 model into its search engine – its bread-and-butter business.
The generative AI boom showed up in Baidu’s December-quarter results via a 26 per cent jump in cloud revenue. That rise, driven by services provided to developers chasing computing power, was overshadowed by weak advertising sales amid China’s economic malaise.
Baidu concluded last month a drawn-out deal to acquire the YY Live streaming platform Joyy. The US$2.1 billion takeover released some US$1.6 billion that Baidu previously deposited into escrow accounts, which it plans to invest into AI and cloud infrastructure. BLOOMBERG
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