China’s Baidu Launches Two New AI Models as Competition Within China’s AI Sector Intensifies

Chinese tech company Baidu announced yesterday the launch of two new artificial intelligence (AI) models as it tries to keep up with rival DeepSeek.

According to Reuters, the new AI models are ERNIE 4.5 and X1. Ernie X1 is a deep-thinking reasoning model with multimodal capabilities. ERNIE 4.5 is the company’s latest foundation model and new-generation native multimodal model.  

In addition, the company announced that its AI chatbot ERNIE Bot has been made free for individual users via the official website.

ERNIE 4.5 Input and output prices start as low as $0.55 per 1M tokens and $2.2 per 1M tokens. ERNIE X1 Input and output prices start as low as $0.28 per 1M tokens and $1.1 per 1M tokens, respectively.

Baidu’s competitor DeepSeek released its reasoning model DeepSeek R1 earlier this year. The AI model was said to have been developed at a lower cost than other AI models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The release of DeepSeek-R1 caused unsettling in the AI industry. DeepSeek’s arrival rattled investors, wiping billions of Dollars off the market value of chip giant Nvidia. Following the crash, Nvidia announced that the DeepSeek R1 model would be available as an NVIDIA NIM microservice. The DeepSeek-R1 NIM microservice can deliver up to 3,872 tokens per second on a single NVIDIA HGX H200 system.

“Significant test-time computation is critical to enable both real-time inference and higher-quality responses from reasoning models like DeepSeek-R1, requiring larger inference deployments. R1 delivers leading accuracy for tasks demanding logical inference, reasoning, math, coding and language understanding while also delivering high inference efficiency,” concluded Nvidia.