(Yicai) March 17 -- Chinese tech giant Baidu has released Ernie 4.5, the latest version of its foundation model that can outperform GPT-4.5, and Ernie X1, a reasoning model that can compete with DeepSeek-R1, making the 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 on April 1. 

“The launch of Ernie 4.5 and Ernie X1 marks a significant milestone in pushing the boundaries of multimodal and reasoning models, offering advanced capabilities at a more accessible price point,” the Beijing-based firm said.

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

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

Baidu will release Ernie Bot 5.0 in the second half of this year, intensify the commercialization of AI applications, and open-source its AI model on June 30, Chief Executive Robin Li said at a company meeting earlier this year, Yicai learned.

Baidu has been heavily investing in AI and was the first Chinese company to launch a ChatGPT-like model in March 2023.

Shares of Baidu [HKG: 9888] closed 0.4 percent higher at HKD92.05 (USD11.85) each in Hong Kong today. The stock has gained just 11.3 percent since the end of last year.

Editor: Martin Kadiev