Baidu Launches ERNIE 4.5 and X1 AI Models, Claiming Cost and Performance Edge

The Chinese tech giant makes its chatbot services free and announces plans to open-source its AI models by June 2025.

Baidu unveiled ERNIE 4.5, a multimodal foundation model, and ERNIE X1, a reasoning-focused model, claiming superior performance at significantly lower costs than competitors like OpenAI and DeepSeek.
ERNIE 4.5 integrates text, image, audio, and video processing, while ERNIE X1 is designed for advanced reasoning tasks such as logical inference and complex calculations.
The company has made its chatbot services free ahead of schedule and plans to open-source its AI models by June 30, 2025, to encourage global adoption and innovation.
Baidu’s models are priced to be highly cost-efficient, with ERNIE 4.5 costing just 1% of GPT-4.5 and ERNIE X1 priced at half the cost of DeepSeek R1.
The announcement has positively impacted Baidu’s stock price, reflecting market optimism about its competitive position in the global AI race.