Baidu Says Its New AI Is Smarter Than DeepSeek's — And Costs Half As Much: 'Excellent Multimodal Understanding Ability'

As the AI race intensifies, Baidu, Inc. BIDU has positioned itself as a serious contender by launching two new models it says rival top competitors.

What Happened: On Sunday, Baidu unveiled ERNIE X1 and ERNIE 4.5, the latest iterations of its artificial intelligence models designed to compete in a landscape dominated by players like OpenAI and DeepSeek, reported Reuters.

"ERNIE X1 delivers performance on par with DeepSeek R1 at only half the price," Baidu said in a statement, describing it as a "reasoning-focused" model with superior capabilities in understanding, planning, reflection, and evolution.

The company also said that it's the first "deep thinking" model to use tools autonomously.

See Also: Apple Reportedly Fights UK Government’s ‘Unacceptable’ Encryption Order Behind Closed Doors — No Press Or Public Allowed

ERNIE 4.5 reportedly features "excellent multimodal understanding ability," meaning it can process and generate across text, image, audio, and video formats.

Baidu said its language, memory, logic, and content-generation skills are all "comprehensively improved."

The company also touted its model's emotional intelligence: "It has high EQ. It can understand memes and satirical cartoons," Baidu added.

Subscribe to the Benzinga Tech Trends newsletter to get all the latest tech developments delivered to your inbox.

Why It’s Important: The new models come at a time when DeepSeek has disrupted the global AI race by releasing high-performance models at significantly lower costs than U.S. rivals.

Although Baidu was one of China's first tech giants to launch a ChatGPT-style chatbot, widespread adoption has been elusive, the report noted.

Last month, Baidu’s market value dropped by $2.4 billion following the absence of its founder, Robin Li, from a significant meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Baidu’s Q4 earnings report revealed a 2% decline in revenue year-on-year, although it surpassed analyst expectations.

Check out more of Benzinga’s Consumer Tech coverage by following this link.

Photo by testing on Shutterstock

Read Next:

Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.