Men communicate with a Baidu Robot near the company logo at the head office in Beijing, China April 23, 2021.
Florence Lo | Reuters
Beijing – China Baidu Plans to release the next generation of his artificial intelligence model in the second half of this year, according to a source that is familiar with the issue, because newer players such as Deepseek disrupt the segment.
Ernie 5.0, called a ‘foundation model’, will have ‘major improvements in multimodal possibilities’, the source said without specifying the functions. “Multimodal” AI can process texts, videos, images and audio to combine them and convert them in categories, for example, text to video and vice versa.
Foundation models can understand language and perform a wide range of tasks, including generating text and images, and communicating in natural language.
The planned update of Baidu comes when Chinese companies race to develop innovative AI models to compete with OpenAI and other American companies. At the end of January, the Startup Deepseek, which was established in Hangzhou, led a global sale of technical shares with the release of the open-source AI model that impressed users with its reasoning options and claims to drastically substantiate OpenAi’s Chatgpt at the expense.
“We live in an exciting time … The inference costs [of foundation models] In principle, it can be reduced by more than 90% for 12 months, “said Baidu CEO Robin Li at the World Regrestment Summit in Dubai this week. According to a press release from his Hireside chat with Omar Sultan Al Olama, Minister of State of State De VAE, artificial intelligence, digital economy and external working applications.
“If you can lower the costs by a certain percentage, it means that your productivity increases by that kind of percentage. I think that is almost the nature of innovation,” Li noted.
Baidu was the first major Chinese technology company that rolled out a chatgpt-like chatbot in March 2023, Ernie. But despite the first momentum, the product has since been overshadowed by other Chinese AI-Chatbots from startups and large tech companies such as such Alibaba And bytedance.
Although the shares of Alibaba have risen 33% so far, Baidu shares have risen by 6%. Tencent has achieved a profit of around 4% so far. Bytedance is not mentioned.
The Ernie model of Baidu already supports the integration of generative AI in various products from the company and the business-oriented products, including cloud storage and content creation.
Last month Baidu said his Wenku platform for creating presentations and other documents had reached 40 million paying users from the end of 2024, an increase of 60% from the end of 2023. Opinated functions, such as the use of AI for one To generate presentation on the basis of a company’s financial submission, started to be rolled out to users in January.
The current version of the Ernie model is Generation 4, released in October 2023. An improved “turbo” version Ernie 4.0 was released in August 2024. Baidu has officially announced no plans to release the next generation update.
The latest version of OpenAi’s Chatgpt, GPT-4O, was released in May 2024. OpenAi CEO Sam Altman said earlier this month in a Reddit “Ask me something” session that there was no audience Timeline for the release of GPT-5.
Baidu did not respond to a request for comment.