Baidu Inc. released a new artificial intelligence model that articulates its reasoning, in an apparent bid to regain momentum against up-and-coming rivals like DeepSeek.The Ernie X1 model by China’s internet search leader works similarly to DeepSeek R1 — which shocked Silicon Valley by offering comparable performance to the world’s best chatbots at a fraction of their development cost.

Tech giant says reasoning model Ernie X1 ‘delivers performance on par with DeepSeek R1 at only half the price’.

Chinese tech giant Baidu launched two new AI models on Sunday: ERNIE 4.5, a native multimodal model, and ERNIE X1, a deep-thinking reasoning model.

Chinese internet search giant Baidu released a new artificial intelligence reasoning model Sunday and made its AI chatbot services free to consumers as ferocious competition grips the sector.