Baidu Launches Ernie 5.0, AI Assistant Reaches 200 Million Monthly Users
- tech360.tv
- 8 hours ago
- 2 min read
Baidu has unveiled Ernie 5.0, its most advanced artificial intelligence model, capable of processing text, images, audio, and video. The Beijing-based company’s AI-powered assistant now serves 200 million monthly active users, marking significant growth.
Ernie 5.0 is a multimodal model featuring 2.4 trillion parameters. It was first previewed in Nov. and has since climbed global rankings for text performance.
A leaderboard recently published by LMArena showed Ernie-5.0-0110 ranked first among Chinese models and eighth globally in text performance. This placed it ahead of leading US models such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.1-High and Google’s Gemini-2.5-Pro.
Baidu’s new model uses an ultra-large mixture-of-experts architecture with highly sparse activation. This design allows it to use less than 3% of its parameters per inference, which improves efficiency without sacrificing performance.
Separately, Baidu’s chip subsidiary, Kunlunxin Technology, confidentially filed for a Hong Kong initial public offering recently. This move comes amid Beijing’s intensified push for technological self-reliance, particularly in critical sectors like semiconductors, and strong capital market momentum.
Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, stated at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that Chinese AI models might be “six months behind” their US counterparts. He noted that while Chinese developers excel at catching up, they have yet to demonstrate creative innovations that push boundaries.
Despite uncertainties from US export restrictions on advanced chips and related technologies, and Beijing’s ambiguous stance on foreign chips, China’s AI models continue rapid iteration. This fosters a broader ecosystem as adoption expands across various industries.
Data from the AI developer platform Hugging Face reveals that derivative models based on Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen family have surpassed 200,000. This makes it the first open-source model family globally to reach this milestone.
Qwen’s cumulative downloads have reached 1 billion, averaging approximately 1.1 million per day. Alibaba Cloud is the AI and cloud computing unit of Alibaba Group Holding.
DeepSeek, a Hangzhou-based start-up, continues to publish technical papers while the market awaits new model releases. Founder and CEO Liang Wenfeng co-authored a recent paper proposing a training approach called Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections, which helps improve training efficiency.
Beijing-based Zhipu AI and Shanghai-based MiniMax Group, two Chinese AI start-ups, listed in Hong Kong recently. They aim to challenge US leaders such as OpenAI and Anthropic, attracting strong investor appetite by highlighting the cost efficiency of their AI technologies.
Baidu launched Ernie 5.0, a multimodal AI model with 2.4 trillion parameters.
Baidu’s AI assistant now has 200 million monthly active users.
Ernie 5.0 ranks highly in text performance, ahead of some top US models.
Source: SCMP
