Chinese tech giant Baidu has unveiled its open-source AI models, Ernie X1 and Ernie 4.5. The company asserts that these models rival performance metrics from OpenAI and DeepSeek while keeping costs competitive. This development signifies a notable shift towards open-source solutions in the AI industry.
On Saturday, Baidu announced the launch of Ernie X1, a reasoning model described as delivering performance comparable to DeepSeek R1, but at only half the price. Additionally, the company introduced Ernie 4.5, a multimodal foundation model that reportedly outperforms GPT-4.5 across various benchmarks, all while being priced at just 1% of GPT-4.5’s cost.
In a move to enhance accessibility, Baidu stated that its chatbot, Ernie Bot, will be made available for free to the public starting April 1, ahead of its original schedule. The tech giant plans to progressively incorporate Ernie 4.5 and X1 into its robust product ecosystem, including Baidu Search, which is China’s leading search engine.
These new releases from Baidu come at a time when Silicon Valley is grappling with the high costs associated with AI models. This situation has been propelled in part by the recent advancements from DeepSeek, a Chinese startup founded by the hedge fund High Flyer. In December, DeepSeek released its large language model V3, followed by the reasoning model R1 in January. Analysts from Bernstein Research have indicated that these models are comparable or even superior to those from OpenAI, while being priced “anywhere from 20-40x cheaper.”
In the context of AI models, tokens are the smallest unit of data processed. Companies determine pricing based on the number of input tokens and output tokens a model can handle. For Ernie 4.5, Baidu reported that pricing starts as low as 0.004 Chinese yuan per thousand input tokens and 0.016 per thousand output tokens. When converted to US dollars, these figures provide insight into how chat models from OpenAI, DeepSeek, and Baidu compare. While Baidu’s cost claims against OpenAI’s latest, “emotionally intelligent” GPT-4.5 are verified, DeepSeek’s V3 just edges out in cost-effectiveness against Ernie 4.5.
