Baidu’s Ernie 4.5: More Power For Only Half The Price

Chinese tech giant Baidu has made a major move in the global artificial intelligence race by open-sourcing its flagship Ernie 4.5 large language model (LLM), in what industry experts are calling the most significant public AI release from China since DeepSeek.

The release, announced for June 30, is set to challenge established players like OpenAI and Anthropic, and could reshape both pricing and innovation dynamics across the AI sector.

The Ernie 4.5 family consists of 10 multimodal models, ranging from lightweight 0.3 billion parameter versions to heavyweight 424 billion parameter models.

These models are designed for advanced language understanding and generation, as well as visual and multimodal reasoning, and are publicly available under the Apache 2.0 license.

Baidu’s open-source toolkit includes industrial-grade development tools and supports efficient training and deployment across multiple hardware platforms.

Baidu’s decision marks a dramatic shift from its previous proprietary approach, prompted by the disruptive emergence of DeepSeek’s open-source models earlier this year.

DeepSeek’s rapid rise demonstrated that open-source LLMs could match or even surpass closed-source alternatives in both performance and cost-efficiency, pressuring Baidu and other Chinese tech giants to follow suit.

“Every time a major lab open-sources a powerful model, it raises the bar for the entire industry,” said Sean Ren, associate professor at the University of Southern California and Samsung’s AI Researcher of the Year.

Experts believe Baidu’s move will force competitors to justify premium pricing and could spark a global AI price war.

Baidu's Price War On Top AI Companies

While consumers don't care whether a model's code is open-sourced, they do care about lower cost, better performance and support for their language or region.

And these benefits more often than not come from open models, which gives developers and researchers worldwide the freedom to study, modify, and build upon the Ernie 4.5 models.

Industry experts are viewing an open source Ernie as a potential disruption to the U.S and Chinese competitions when it comes to the price war by offering something that is just as powerful for a fraction of the price.

This is equivalent to a declaration of war to the world's startups, saying "stop saying top dollars."

Baidu claims that its latest Ernie X1 model matches DeepSeek’s R1 in performance but at half the price, and API access to Ernie 4.5 is available at just 1% of the cost of GPT-4.5.

This aggressive pricing strategy is expected to accelerate AI adoption and innovation, while putting pressure on rivals to lower their own costs.

Will My Personal Data Be Compromised?

While Baidu’s open-source strategy is seen as a win for global AI innovation, it also raises questions around data security, transparency, and geopolitical competition.

Some experts caution that open-sourcing powerful Chinese models could spark concerns among enterprises and governments over data privacy and the broader influence of Chinese technology.

Baidu’s open-sourcing of Ernie 4.5 signals a pivotal moment in the global AI race, setting new standards for affordability, accessibility, and collaborative innovation.

As more tech giants embrace open-source strategies, the AI landscape is poised for rapid transformation—benefiting developers, enterprises, and end-users worldwide.