Baidu was the primary Chinese language Huge Tech agency to launch an LLM in China in March 2023 following the frenzy created by the discharge of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. However its early-mover benefit was challenged by China’s different AI gamers within the final two years. The search big’s newest transfer to extend its relevance in China’s AI market got here as DeepSeek has fanned an open-source wave, with Alibaba, Tencent and Bytedance galloping forward in grabbing enterprise and shopper customers for his or her fashions.
Baidu didn’t present benchmark outcomes for its new reasoning mannequin Ernie X1, however stated that it “delivers efficiency on par with DeepSeek R1 at solely half the value”.
Pricing for enterprise entry to Ernie X1’s utility programming interface (API) is ready at 2 yuan (US$0.28) per million token inputs and eight yuan per million token outputs, the corporate stated.