Baidu Inc (百度) yesterday released the latest iteration of its flagship artificial intelligence (AI) models, trying to keep up in the highly competitive Chinese AI arena.
Its Ernie 5.0 model is a “natively omni-modal” model that can grasp user commands in various media formats, billionaire cofounder Robin Li (李彥宏) said during the company’s biggest annual tech showcase in Beijing.
“Intelligence itself is the greatest application, and the speed of technological iteration is the only moat,” Li said. “Baidu will continue to invest in and develop more cutting-edge models to push the ceiling of intelligence higher.”
Photo: AP
In benchmarks presented by Baidu on stage, Ernie 5.0 competed with rivals such as DeepSeek (深度求索), Alphabet Inc’s Google Gemini and OpenAI’s GPT-5 in tests for language, audio and visual understanding. While Baidu’s AI rarely had the highest score, the company sought to demonstrate it was keeping up with the leaders.
China’s Internet search pioneer is betting on AI to drive growth, but it faces mounting pressure from open-source models such as DeepSeek, as well as AI-native apps.
Plagued by weakening advertising, its revenue is expected to decline 8 percent — the biggest slide in almost a decade — during the September quarter.
Li touched on the ongoing debate around whether the industry is fomenting an AI bubble.
Without naming companies, he called out an “unhealthy, unsustainable” structure in which chipmakers reap the most benefits of AI, rather than app developers.
“No matter how much money chipmakers make, the models built on top of the chips should generate 10 times the value and the applications developed on top of the models should create 100 times the value — only then can we achieve a healthy industrial ecosystem,” Li said.
The announcement of the new model came at the end of a three-hour demonstration of Baidu’s other offerings.
It has developed two new chips for AI inference and training, which are to be available for sale next year and 2027, executives said, without revealing specs.
In AI software, the company launched an agentic tool for industrial uses such as traffic light control. It is also pushing some of its existing products to overseas markets, including a digital-avatar replacement for streamers and a code-free development tool.
Baidu had a head start in China’s AI race and looked at one point like the country’s most formidable rival to OpenAI, but it soon lost leadership to rivals including ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動) and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴). The two lead in AI-native applications and open-source models respectively, while Baidu is struggling to catch up on both fronts.
Li had previously predicted that proprietary models would stand out in competition — before the emergence of DeepSeek, which prompted his company to reverse course and open-source its Ernie models.
The founder also initially skipped AI video generation, although Baidu is now chasing rivals such as Kuaishou Technology (快手科技), after they proved the monetization potential of that aspect.
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