China’s Baidu Launches Two New AI Models, Rivals DeepSeek R1 at Half the Price

Chinese tech giant Baidu launched two new AI models on Sunday: ERNIE 4.5, a native multimodal model, and ERNIE X1, a deep-thinking reasoning model. The company has also made its AI chatbot, ERNIE Bot, free for individual users earlier than planned.

“As a deep-thinking reasoning model with multimodal capabilities, ERNIE X1 delivers performance on par with DeepSeek R1 at only half the price. Meanwhile, ERNIE 4.5 is our latest foundation model and new-generation native multimodal model,” the company said in a post on X.

The company said that ERNIE 4.5 improves understanding, generation, reasoning, and memory while reducing hallucinations and enhancing logical reasoning and coding abilities. It is now available via APIs on Baidu AI Cloud’s MaaS platform, Qianfan. ERNIE X1 will also be accessible on the platform soon.

For enterprise users, ERNIE 4.5’s input and output pricing starts at $0.55 per 1 million tokens and $2.20 per 1 million tokens, respectively. ERNIE X1’s pricing starts at $0.28 per 1 million tokens for input and $1.10 per 1 million tokens for output.

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

Notably, Baidu was among the first in China to launch a ChatGPT-style chatbot in early 2023, with Ernie 4.0 claiming to rival OpenAI’s GPT-4. However, adoption has lagged due to strong competition, especially from DeepSeek’s R1 model, released last month.

Meanwhile,  DeepSeek plans to release its next reasoning model, the DeepSeek R2, ‘as early as possible.’ The company initially planned to release it in early May but is now considering an earlier timeline. The model is said to produce ‘better coding’ and reason in languages beyond English.