China's Baidu launches upgraded AI models at reduced prices
What's the story
Baidu Inc., the leading Chinese search engine, has launched Ernie 4.5 Turbo and Ernie X1 Turbo, the latest versions of its flagship foundation and reasoning AI models. The new iterations are said to be faster and cheaper than the previous ones. Baidu founder Robin Li announced that the 4.5 Turbo is priced 80% lower than its predecessor. He added that it matched the industry's best in several benchmark tests, demonstrating strong capabilities in areas like coding and language comprehension.
Market competition
Strategic move in AI market
With its latest offerings, Baidu hopes to take on other players in China's fast-growing artificial intelligence (AI) market, including Alibaba Group and DeepSeek. Notably, the X1 Turbo model, Baidu's answer to DeepSeek, has also been priced at half. Following the latest announcements, Baidu shares jumped more than 5% on the Hong Kong stock exchange on Friday.
New products
The Xinxiang AI agent
Along with the upgraded Ernie models, Baidu also launched a bunch of new products. One of them is an AI agent platform called Xinxiang, which is aimed at automating daily tasks. This makes Baidu a competitor to the Chinese service Manus AI. The company has also launched new servers to allow developers to connect their AI models with Baidu's search engine and e-commerce data.
Production
Baidu's AI chip production and market challenges
Li revealed that Baidu has already produced 30,000 AI chips, which are currently in use. Despite being the first company in China's trillion-dollar tech sector to launch a ChatGPT-like chatbot, Baidu faced stiff competition from chatbots developed by ByteDance Ltd. and Moonshot AI. Open-sourced models such as Alibaba's Qwen and DeepSeek have also gained significant recognition within the global developer community.