Chinese tech giant Baidu said it has launched two artificial intelligence models, including the ERNIE X1, which it claims delivers the same performance as DeepSeek R1 “at only half the price.”

Ernie 4.5 is Baidu's new generation multimodal foundation model, which possesses the ability to understand and generate text, images, audio and video content based on given prompts. The model demonstrates comprehensive improvements in terms of understanding, generation, reasoning and memory compared with previous versions.