Organisation
Baidu
The ERNIE family of models and the ERNIE Bot assistant, from China's dominant search company.
Baidu is the Chinese search company that was among the first in the country to field a ChatGPT-style product, launching ERNIE Bot in March 2023. That debut was an awkward one — founder Robin Li narrated a demo built from pre-recorded answers, and the company's shares fell sharply the same day — but Baidu went on to ship successive ERNIE models, and by 2026 reported its assistant products had reached 200 million monthly users. It positions ERNIE as a natively multimodal, mixture-of-experts system competing with both domestic rivals and the largest US models. Like other Chinese labs it has continued releasing large models on a roughly quarterly cadence while operating under US restrictions on the most advanced training chips, and in 2025 it open-sourced parts of the ERNIE 4.5 family after years of closed releases.
- Category
- Chinese AI labs
- Founded
- 2000
- HQ
- Beijing, CN
- Key people
- Robin Li
Featured in threads
Tracks
- Models & capabilities 8
- Benchmarks & progress 1
- Open weights & ecosystem 1
- Culture & impact 1
Baidu launches ERNIE 5.0, a 2.4-trillion-parameter native multimodal model
Baidu said the mixture-of-experts model activates under 3% of its parameters per query and ranked first among Chinese models, eighth globally, on LMArena's text leaderboard.
Models & capabilities · Benchmarks & progress
Baidu releases ERNIE 5.0 preview
A natively omni-modal model jointly trained on text, images, audio and video, which Baidu presented as competitive with GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro on its own benchmark slides.
Models & capabilities
Baidu open-sources the ERNIE 4.5 model family
The ten variants include MoE models with 47B and 3B active parameters (up to 424B total) and a 0.3B dense model, reversing Baidu's prior closed-weight strategy for its flagship line.
Open weights & ecosystem · Models & capabilities
Baidu unveils ERNIE 4.5 and reasoning model ERNIE X1, makes ERNIE Bot free
Baidu said ERNIE X1 matched DeepSeek R1's performance at half its price, and moved ERNIE Bot to free access two weeks ahead of its planned schedule.
Models & capabilities
Baidu unveils ERNIE 4.0
Baidu called it its most capable model and claimed parity with GPT-4; access was invitation-only at launch, with enterprise API testing through the Qianfan platform.
Models & capabilities
Baidu's ERNIE Bot receives regulatory approval for public release
Approval followed China's July 2023 rule requiring a licence before releasing generative-AI models to the public; ERNIE Bot topped Apple's China App Store within hours.
Models & capabilities
Baidu unveils ERNIE Bot
Robin Li narrated a demo built from pre-recorded answers rather than live queries; investors wiped roughly $3 billion off Baidu's market value the same day.
Models & capabilities · Culture & impact
Baidu announces ERNIE 3.0 Titan
Built with Peng Cheng Laboratory, the 260-billion-parameter model reported state-of-the-art results on more than 60 Chinese-language NLP tasks.
Models & capabilities
Also mentioned in 3 entries
Referenced in passing — Baidu isn't the main subject of these.