Baidu Joins Open-Source AI Race with Release of Ernie 4.5 Models

Baidu has released 10 variants of its Ernie 4.5 large language models (LLMs) to the public, marking a major shift in strategy as it joins China’s growing open-source AI movement.

Credit: BAIDU

The Beijing-based tech giant made the models available for download on Hugging Face, the world’s largest open-source AI platform, on Monday.

The Ernie 4.5 family includes models ranging from 0.3 billion to 424 billion parameters. The release follows a broader trend among Chinese tech firms to open their AI systems, spurred by the success of start-up DeepSeek’s open-source models earlier this year.

Baidu, one of the earliest developers of LLMs in China after the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, had previously maintained a proprietary approach. Founder and CEO Robin Li Yanhong had said the Ernie series would outperform open-source models.

However, the rise of DeepSeek’s V3 and R1 models, which gained global attention for their cost-efficient, high-performance capabilities, prompted Baidu to pivot.

Baidu said its 300 billion parameter Ernie 4.5 model outperformed DeepSeek’s V3 model in benchmark tests, despite being half the size. The tests measured general and domain knowledge, coding, maths, and reasoning skills.

The company credited three innovations for the performance boost: a heterogeneous mixture-of-experts model structure, improved AI infrastructure, and efficient scaling designs.

Baidu said the models excel in instruction following, world knowledge memorisation, visual understanding, and multimodal reasoning.

The open-source Ernie 4.5 models are released under the Apache 2.0 licence, allowing free use, modification, and distribution.

Credit: BAIDU

The proprietary version of Ernie 4.5 was first introduced in March.

Baidu’s move comes as other Chinese tech firms, including Alibaba, MiniMax, Moonshot AI, and Huawei, increase their open-source efforts. On the same day as Baidu’s release, Huawei open-sourced two of its Pangu AI models.

Baidu’s shift reflects intensifying competition in China’s AI sector, where companies are moving away from closed systems to gain developer support and global relevance.

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• Baidu released 10 open-source Ernie 4.5 models on Hugging Face

• Models range from 0.3 billion to 424 billion parameters

• Baidu claims its 300B model outperforms DeepSeek’s larger V3

Source: SCMP