In a fiercely competitive AI race, China’s Baidu announced on Sunday ( 16 March ) that it had launched two new artificial intelligence ( AI ) models, including a new reasoning-focused model that it claimed compared to DeepSeek’s model.
Chinese AI company DeepSeek’s roll-out of AI types, which it claims is on par with, or even better than, industry-leading types in the United States at a fraction of the cost, has stung the economy and rekindled the Artificial race globally.
“ERNIE X1 delivers effectiveness on par with DeepSeek R1 at only half the price,” Baidu wrote of one of the new concepts.
According to Baidu, the X1 has” stronger knowledge, planning, mirror, and evolution capabilities,” making it the first serious thinking model to use tools independently.
Baidu claimed that its most recent base model, ERNIE 4.5, has “excellent bidirectional knowledge ability.”
It has more advanced vocabulary skills, and its comprehension, technology, reasoning, and memory skills have been significantly improved.
According to Baidu, it also has “high EQ,” and it is simple to understand system memes and sarcastic cartoons.
More than two weeks prior to plan, Baidu even made the models available for free use. People earlier had to pay a monthly fee to get the company’s most recent AI designs.
The Beijing-based organization was one of China’s first to release a conceptual AI system officially in 2023, but more users have since joined chatbots created by TikTok owners ByteDance and Moonshot AI.
With a concept that performed similarly to those of rivals like the United States-made ChatGPT, but price significantly less to build, Baidu is facing stiff competition in the consumer-facing AI sector.
Foreign businesses and local government organizations have rushed to integrate DeepSeek’s open-source type into their work since then, while another technology businesses have been playing catch-up.
Baidu has integrated the R1 logic type of DeepSeek into its research website.
Tencent, the owner of Snapchat, unveiled a new AI design in February that claimed it could answer queries more quickly than DeepSeek even though its communications platform already had its own technology.
Modal AI systems are capable of converting content across these types and processing various types of data, including text, video, images, and music.