The world was just getting used to Chinese AI company DeepSeek being cheaper and better than many AI models released in the west, but it’s now been upstaged — and by another Chinese company at that.
Baidu, which is best known for its Google-like search engine in China, has released a new AI model which it claims gives DeepSeek-level performance at half the price. “We’ve just unveiled ERNIE 4.5 & X1!” the company posted on X. “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. Plus, our AI chatbot ERNIE Bot has now been made free to individual users ahead of schedule. Both models are now freely accessible to all ERNIE Bot users via its official website: https://yiyan.baidu.com,” it added.
“ERNIE 4.5 achieves collaborative optimization through joint modeling of multiple modalities, exhibiting comprehensive improvements in understanding, generation, reasoning and memory, along with notable enhancements in hallucination prevention, logical reasoning, and coding abilities,” Baidu said.
Baidu’s benchmark results for ERNIE showed that the model compared favorably to OpenAI’s GPT-4o on most benchmarks. More impressively, it also managed to hold its own against OpenAI’s latest GPT-4.5 model on many benchmarks.
“For enterprise users and developers, ERNIE 4.5 is now accessible via APIs on Baidu AI Cloud’s MaaS platform Qianfan, while ERNIE X1 is set to be available on the platform soon,” Baidu said. For ERNIE 4.5, input and output prices start at $0.55 per 1M tokens and $2.2 per 1M tokens, respectively, while for ERNIE X1, input and output prices start at $0.28 per 1M tokens and $1.1 per 1M tokens, respectively.
It’s not surprising that China has created another model that more than matches DeepSeek– it has a slew of companies that at working on cutting-edge AI tech. But while the west seems to view Chinese AI as a monolith, it is in fact composed of several companies that are furiously competing against each other to create the best models. With Baidu now creating a model that replicates DeepSeek at half the price, the competitive intensity in China’s AI ecosystem will only heat up. And this competitiveness — much like in the US — will likely help produce ever stronger AI models in China.