Baidu’s Ernie 4.5 is expected to become open source by June 30, 2025, while the company said it’s also making its chatbot, Ernie Bot, free to the public on April 1, ahead of schedule
By Ada Jain
On March 15, Baidu released Ernie X1, an artificial intelligence (AI) reasoning model it said “delivers performance on par with DeepSeek R1 at only half the price.” In terms of reasoning models, conversions to U.S. dollars show that Ernie X1 is the cheapest of all with prices just under 2% of OpenAI’s o1.
Simultaneously, Baidu also released Ernie 4.5 which the company claimed, “outperforms GPT-4.5 in multiple benchmarks while priced at just 1% of GPT-4.5.” The tech giant said it will “progressively integrate” Ernie 4.5 and X1 into its product ecosystem, including Baidu Search, China’s dominant search engine. “ERNIE X1 delivers performance on par with DeepSeek R1 at only half the price,” Baidu said in a statement.
READ: China disrupts AI market with DeepSeek: A better, cheaper version of ChatGPT? (January 27, 2025)
In 2024, the MSCI (Morgan Stanley Capital International) Emerging Markets Index yielded a 7.50% total return for China, performing better than the MSCI EAFE (Europe, Australasia, and Far East) Index but substantially trailing behind the U.S. markets, as the S&P 500 (which measures stock performance of 500 of the largest companies listed on stock exchanges in the United States) delivered a 25.02% total return. MSCI Emerging Markets Index is a market capitalization-weighted index designed to track the performance of key companies in fast-growing, emerging economies, covering large and mid-cap representation across 24 countries, including China.
However, 2025 has seen a reversal—through March 10, the MSCI Emerging Markets Index has gained 3.81% on a total return basis, while the S&P 500 has declined by 4.30%. Haworth notes that China’s recent market recovery can be partly attributed to its advancements in artificial intelligence, specifically citing the AI platform DeepSeek and Alibaba’s AI technology as potential positive drivers for China’s economy.
As the world’s second-largest economy behind the United States, China remains categorized as an emerging market but it dominates the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, accounting for over 25% of the index’s composition.
Adding to the AI race, Tsinghua University collaborators have recently developed Chitu, a high-performance artificial intelligence framework for large language models (LLMs), which can operate on chips made in China, challenging the dominance of Nvidia’s Hopper series graphics processing units (GPUs) in supporting certain models, such as DeepSeek-R1.
The initiative is part of a broader effort by Chinese AI companies to lessen dependence on Nvidia, whose high-performance GPUs are subject to the U.S. export controls. Nvidia is banned by the U.S. government from selling its advanced H100 and H800 chips from the Hopper series to China-based clients.
In late January, the $593 billion loss in Nvidia’s market value in a single day is a reflection of these worries amidst strained the U.S.-China relations. Manus AI and Alibaba’s Qwen series are other perfect examples of back-to-back innovation which is apparently aimed at fighting back against the U.S.
Baidu’s Ernie 4.5 is expected to become open source by June 30, 2025, while the company said it’s also making its chatbot, Ernie Bot, free to the public on April 1, ahead of schedule.