With Baidu ERNIE 4.5 launch, another one bites the dust!

Another one bites the dust! Oh, that's a famous number rendered by Queen, many years ago! 

We had DeepSeek shocking the AI world earlier, with R1. Now, we have another slam dunk from China -- Baidu's ERNIE 4.5! 

ERNIE 4.5 is trained on massive pieces of data, and can do a bunch of different tasks. ERNIE 4.5 scores 77.77% vs. 73.92% for ChatGPT. ERNIE Bot is being made free to the public ahead of schedule. Earlier this year, Baidu had announced a plan that the ERNIE Bot would become fully-free to individual users starting April 1. 

For enterprise users and developers, ERNIE 4.5 is now accessible via APIs on Baidu AI Cloud's MaaS platform Qianfan, and ERNIE X1 is set to be available on the platform soon.

ERNIE 4.5's multimodal capabilities are evident in its ability to integrate and understand text, images, audio, and video content. ERNIE 4.5 also possesses strong intelligence and contextual awareness, effortlessly understanding Internet memes, satirical cartoons, and more. There are loads of benchmarks, such as OCR Bench, Chart QA, Math Vista, Doc VQA, and more. This can be very suitable for researchers and developers that need to work with text and images, or both.

ERNIE X1 is more reasoning-focused and deep-thinking model. ERNIE X1 is said to deliver performance on par with DeepSeek R1, and at only half the price. ERNIE X1 is said to have stronger understanding, planning, reflection, and evolution capabilities. This is the first deep thinking model that uses tools autonomously. ERNIE 4.5 is said to be on par with DeepSeek V3 Chat. Baidu has called all of this the democratization of AI.

The question arises: Why are they all making this free, if advanced AI is so expensive to develop? Essentially, it can give them a massive user base. More data means better models for enterprises that can attract more development.

Baidu declared it will make ERNIE AI models open-source from June 30, representing a major strategic shift after the rise of DeepSeek. It has integrated the DeepSeek R1 model into its search engine -- the company's bread-and-butter business. Baidu is well aware of DeepSeek's strengths.

ERNIE 4.5 is estimated to be only 1% the price of GPT-4.5! ERNIE 4.5 is said to be offering 0.004 Yuan per 1000 tokens input, and 0.016 Yuan per 1000 tokens output. This kind of pricing can be a game changer for a small startup! 

Earlier, Tencent had released a new AI model that it claimed can reply faster than DeepSeek-R1, but integrated that into some features. Alibaba had partnered with Apple on AI features. Alibaba has also said it will invest Yuan 380 billion ($52.4 billion) in cloud computing and AI over the next three years.

Baidu had 26% jump in cloud income last year, but also had 6% drop in non-GAAP net income. Still, developers are now testing their model, as are consumers. DeepSeek, and now Baidu, are happily breaking the narrative that very big bucks are needed for the AI development work. Maybe, more could follow! Already, ByteDance and Tencent are hot on the heels. The world already has DeepSeek!

Lot of development work has been happening in China. For instance, Guangdong rolled out 12 AI and robotics-related policies to accelerate industrial digitalization. It will fund up to 10 AI and robotics projects annually, offering subsidies of up to Yuan 8 million ($1.1 million) per project. 

Hunyuan Turbo S can pump out text twice as faster as before. Byte Dance's Doubao large model will release video generation model on Sept. 24. Similarly, Jakarta, Indonesia, is also said to be stepping up their game.

iResearch stats show that China's AI industry is projected to reach Yuan 811 billion ($111.8 billion) by 2028. Emerging sectors like AI and robotics are poised to unlock the significant market potential and development opportunities. For now, Baidu, along with DeepSeek, is leading the drive called 'AI for all'!

So, where does the Queen song resonate exactly? Well, China is powering ahead with AI and AI models, even as the others are jostling and lining up for attention! While they stand, and try to barge in, China is developing and launching the very latest AI models, one after the other. And, at much, much lower prices!