Baidu, a tech giant in China, announced on Sunday the launch of two new artificial intelligence models in a bid to excel in the competitive AI field. One model, ERNIE X1, stands out for its enhanced reasoning capabilities, rivalling industry-leading models.
DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup, has shaken the industry by introducing AI models that are on par with or surpass US counterparts, all while being more cost-effective. Baidu highlighted that ERNIE X1 matches DeepSeek R1 in performance but at half the cost, boasting superior understanding, planning, reflection, and evolution features.
The company's latest model, ERNIE 4.5, excels in multimodal understanding, showcasing advanced language skills and enhanced logical and memory capabilities. Baidu noted its "high EQ" and ease of grasping network memes and satirical cartoons.
Despite its claims of performance comparable to OpenAI's GPT-4, Baidu has faced challenges in gaining widespread adoption for its Ernie large language model. Multimodal AI systems, like ERNIE 4.5, can process various data types such as text, video, images, and audio, enabling content conversion among these formats.