Zhijiang, China – March 16, 2023: View of the logo of Ernie Bot, an AI chatbot service developed by Chinese search engine Baidu, on March 16, 2023.
Long wei | Future Publishing | Getty Images
China’s Baidu said on Sunday it launched two new artificial intelligence models, including one that focuses on new reasoning that rivals Deepseek’s models, as it stands out in a fiercely competitive AI race.
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek says that it is deploying an AI model, or even better than the leading US models.
“The Ernie X1 offers performance at half the price on the Deepseek R1 and PAR,” Baidu said of one of the new models. The X1 “has more powerful understanding, planning, reflexion and evolutionary capabilities,” Baidu said, adding that it is the first deep thinking model to use the tool autonomously.
Baidu said that the latest basic model, Ernie 4.5, “has excellent multimodal understanding ability. It has high language ability and comprehensive improvements in its understanding, generation, logic and memory capabilities.”
There’s also “High EQ,” which makes it easy to understand network memes and satirical comics, Baidu said.
Baidu, one of China’s earliest tech giants to launch a ChatGpt-style chatbot, is struggling to gain widespread adoption of Ernie’s leading language model despite claiming performance comparable to Openai’s GPT-4 amid fierce competition.
Multimodal AI systems can process and integrate a wide range of data types, including text, video, images, audio, and more, and can convert content in these formats.
