Chinese internet search giant Baidu will open source its Ernie gen AI large language model as soon as this week, with uncertain consequences for the market.

Beijing-based Baidu, one of the earliest tech firms in China to develop LLMs, has made a U-turn by making its models open source.

The company had said that Ernie X1 delivers performance on par with DeepSeek R1 at only half the price. Update: The story has been updated with a blog post provided by Baidu.

Baidu’s ERNIE 4.5 follows a trend increasingly visible in China’s AI ecosystem. DeepSeek, a relative newcomer, shook up the landscape by prioritizing openness, benchmark transparency, and ...

Nvidia Corp. boss Jensen Huang lauded DeepSeek and China’s other contributions to AI research as he met with political and ...

Baidu may also be trying to take advantage of the substantial headwinds faced by DeepSeek Ltd., which has reportedly been forced to delay the release of its next-generation R2 model.