Baidu was the first Chinese Big Tech firm to launch an LLM in China in March 2023 following the frenzy created by the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But its early-mover advantage was challenged by China’s other AI players in the last two years. The search giant’s latest move to increase its relevance in China’s AI market came as DeepSeek has fanned an open-source wave, with Alibaba, Tencent and Bytedance galloping ahead in grabbing business and consumer users for their models.
Baidu did not provide benchmark results for its new reasoning model Ernie X1, but said that it “delivers performance on par with DeepSeek R1 at only half the price”.
Pricing for business access to Ernie X1’s application programming interface (API) is set at 2 yuan (US$0.28) per million token inputs and 8 yuan per million token outputs, the company said.
