(Yicai) March 17 -- Baidu has launched Ernie 4.5, the latest version of the Chinese tech giant's foundation model that can outperform GPT-4.5, and Ernie X1, a reasoning model that can compete with DeepSeek-R1, making its two new artificial intelligence models free ahead of schedule.

The native multimodal foundation model Ernie 4.5 and deep-thinking reasoning model Ernie X1 can be accessed for free through Ernie Bot's official website, Baidu announced yesterday. Earlier this year, the firm said its AI model would become free to individual users starting April 1. 

The input price of Ernie X1 is 28 US cents per million tokens, which is half that of DeepSeek's reasoning model, Baidu noted, adding that the input price of Ernie 4.5 is 55 US cents per million tokens.

Ernie 4.5 outperforms GPT-4.5 in multiple benchmarks while priced at just 1 percent of the large language model within OpenAI's GPT series, Baidu said. The Beijing-based company plans to gradually integrate Ernie 4.5 and X1 into its product ecosystem, covering its search engine, the Wenxiaoyan app, and other products, it noted.

Baidu will release version 5.0 of Ernie Bot in the second half of this year, increase the commercialization of AI applications, and open-source its AI model on June 30, Chief Executive Robin Li said earlier in an internal speech, Yicai learned.

Shares of Baidu [HKG: 9888] rose 1 percent to HKD92.55 (USD11.91) each as of 10.45 a.m. in Hong Kong today.

Editor: Maritn Kadiev