Baidu unveils two new AI models, making Ernie Bot free ahead of schedule

A visitor interacts with Baidu's Ernie AI chatbot model during an expo in Shanghai. (LONG WEI/FOR CHINA DAILY)

Chinese tech giant Baidu Inc has unveiled its latest large language model Ernie 4.5 and deep-thinking reasoning model Ernie X1, both of which are now freely accessible to individual users.

Ernie 4.5 is Baidu's new generation multimodal foundation model, which possesses the ability to understand and generate text, images, audio and video content based on given prompts. The model demonstrates comprehensive improvements in terms of understanding, generation, reasoning and memory compared with previous versions.

It boasts enhancements in hallucination prevention, logical reasoning, and coding abilities, outperforming the US' OpenAI's GPT-4.5 in multiple benchmarks while priced at just 1 percent of GPT-4.5.

As a deep-thinking reasoning model with multimodal capabilities, Ernie X1 delivers performance on par with DeepSeek R1 at only half the price, Baidu said. It also excels in Chinese knowledge Q&A, literary creation, manuscript writing, dialogue, logical reasoning and complex calculations.

Baidu said it will continue to invest in artificial intelligence, data centers and cloud infrastructure to advance its AI capabilities, and develop smarter and more powerful next-generation models.

It plans to integrate Ernie 4.5 and Ernie X1 across its ecosystem, including Baidu Search and the Wenxiaoyan app.

With the launch of the two models, Ernie Bot is free to the public ahead of schedule, and users can access both models free of charge.