The Chinese tech company Baidu has launched two new AI models on the market. According to the company, these are a basic model called Ernie 4.5 and the Ernie X1 model, which focuses on logical thinking.
According to the company, this should offer “the same performance” as the Chinese chatbot DeepSeek, but cost “only half as much”.
The Chinese start-up DeepSeek caused a sensation at the beginning of the year with its chatbot. The company claimed to have developed a product at a fraction of the usual cost that was on a par with the competition from ChatGPT from US top dog OpenAI. This triggered a brief stock market tremor in the United States, as investors questioned the efficiency of US tech companies. The share price of chip manufacturer Nvidia briefly plummeted by 17%.
The internet company Baidu, based in Beijing, first became known in China for its search engine of the same name. Baidu is also a leader in the field of autonomous driving and operates a robotaxi division called Apollo. In 2023, Baidu launched the first version of the AI chatbot Ernie.
dpa