Baidu has released two new AI models, ERNIE 4.5 and ERNIE X1, claiming they outperform competitors like DeepSeek and OpenAI on various benchmarks while offering significantly lower pricing. Carl Franzen, writing for VentureBeat, reports that ERNIE 4.5 is a multimodal language model while X1 focuses on reasoning capabilities. The models are notably cheaper than competitors, with ERNIE 4.5 costing 99% less than OpenAI’s GPT-4.5. However, limitations include a small context window of 8,000 tokens and current lack of open-source licensing. Baidu plans to make ERNIE 4.5 open source by June 30, 2025. Both models are accessible through Baidu’s ERNIE Bot and via API on the Qianfan platform, with ERNIE 4.5 available now and X1 coming soon.