Chinese search engine Baidu has launched two new AI models — Ernie 4.5, the latest version of the company’s foundational model first released two years ago — and a new reasoning model, Ernie X1.

Chinese tech firm Baidu released two artificial intelligence models to rival DeepSeek and other competitors. The first is ERNIE X1 which matches DeepSeek R1’s performance “at only half the

Baidu, a major AI and internet company, has unveiled its latest foundation models: ERNIE 4.5, a native multimodal model, and ERNIE X1, a deep-thinking reasoning model. The company noted that this launch highlights its focus on advancing next-generation AI technologies.