BEIJING: Taiwanese search engine slam dubbed Baidu’s announcement to make its next-generation artificial intelligence type Ernie open-source starting on June 30. This is a significant change in strategy as the competition is fierce.
The development of DeepSeek has upended the field, but Baidu CEO Robin Li had long advocated for closed-source types as the only viable route for AI growth. The company claims to have more affordable operating costs than US pioneer OpenAI’s developed systems in terms of performance.
Keen to improve market share, Baidu even announced on Thursday that it would render its AI robot Ernie Bot , free , starting Apr 1, about a month and a half after introducing premium editions.
Following the 2022 comeback of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Baidu was one of the first major Chinese companies to seriously invest in AI. But, its Ernie big language model has struggled to gain widespread adoption. Baidu has said its latest version, Ernie 4.0, matches OpenAI’s GPT-4 features.
In China, ByteDance’s Doubao robot has the most effective regular people with 78.6 million, DeepSeek has 33.7 million while Ernie Bot has 13 million, according to January information from AI product monitor Aicpb.com.
In a Twitter article, Baidu stated,” We will progressively build the Ernie 4.5 set in the upcoming month and officially open-source it from Jun 30.
Li appeared to possess changed tack on open-source growth,  , telling , participants at an occasion in Dubai this week that it may expand AI implementation.
” If you open things up, a lot of people may be curious enough to consider it. This will help spread the tech many faster”, he said.
Baidu also plans to launch a new next-generation type, Ernie 5, in the second half of 2025, a man familiar with the matter has  , said.