Baidu's New AI Is Already Beating Prime Fashions and Value 94% Much less to Construct – Decrypt

Baidu, China’s equal of Google, formally launched ERNIE 5.1 late final week, and the headline quantity is tough to disregard: The mannequin value roughly 94% much less to coach than comparable AI methods on the identical scale.

To place that in perspective, coaching a frontier AI mannequin sometimes prices a number of hundreds of thousands (if not billions) of {dollars} in compute. Baidu, which controls over 76% of China’s search market and trades on Nasdaq as BIDU, is claiming it pulled off the identical class of efficiency for a couple of twentieth of that.

The trick is known as “multi-dimensional elastic pre-training.” As a substitute of constructing ERNIE 5.1 from scratch, Baidu extracted an optimized sub-network from its current ERNIE 5.0 structure—which it launched in January 2026—and compressed it down. Complete parameters dropped to about one-third of the unique. Energetic parameters (those truly doing work throughout a dialog) have been lower in half. The result’s a leaner mannequin that inherited the information base of its bigger guardian with out repeating the total coaching invoice.

On LMArena Search Area—a leaderboard the place actual customers evaluate AI fashions on stay net search duties, scored by human choice—ERNIE 5.1 scored 1,223, touchdown fourth globally and first amongst all Chinese language fashions. Its agentic capabilities—how nicely it handles multi-step duties like filling spreadsheets or autonomously shopping the net—surpassed DeepSeek-V4-Professional, the earlier Chinese language benchmark-setter.

ERNIE could sound like an unique title amongst western observers, nevertheless it’s truly a serious mannequin in China. Baidu launched Ernie Bot in August 2023, and the chatbot reached 100 million customers in China by December of that 12 months—sooner than most Chinese language rivals, although nonetheless slower than ChatGPT’s international report two-month run to the identical milestone.

The effectivity angle echoes what DeepSeek did to the AI business in January 2025. When the Chinese language startup launched R1—a mannequin that matched OpenAI’s o1 at 98% decrease question value—it triggered a $600 billion wipeout in Nvidia’s market worth and compelled each main AI lab to rethink whether or not throwing compute at issues was the one viable technique. ERNIE 5.1 is a distinct type of effectivity story—on the coaching facet somewhat than inference—however the underlying message is identical: Chinese language labs maintain discovering methods to do extra with much less.

The post-training pipeline can also be price noting. Baidu constructed a four-stage reinforcement studying system it calls MOPD (Multi-Trainer On-Coverage Distillation). Fairly than making an attempt to show each talent directly—which tends to trigger “seesaw results” the place, for instance, enhancing math efficiency tanks artistic writing—Baidu educated specialist knowledgeable fashions in parallel for code, reasoning, and agentic duties, then distilled all of them right into a single unified mannequin. A closing on-line reinforcement studying stage dealt with open-ended conversations and artistic output, preserving what the distillation course of could not seize nicely.

In concept it ought to imply all expertise are leveled when it comes to proficiency, with out one being prioritized over the opposite

On GPQA (Graduate-Degree Google-Proof Q&A, a benchmark measuring whether or not a mannequin can reply expert-level science questions that may’t be Googled), ERNIE 5.1 approaches the efficiency of main western closed-source fashions. On AIME26—the American Invitational Arithmetic Examination tailored for 2026, which checks superior problem-solving beneath competitors situations—the mannequin scored 99.6% when utilizing tool-assisted reasoning, trailing solely Gemini 3.1 Professional.

Baidu says ERNIE 5.1 is already rolling out throughout greater than 10 artistic and agentic platforms in China, together with AI roleplay platforms and quick drama technology instruments. The mannequin is accessible at ernie.baidu.com and by way of API on Baidu’s AI Cloud platform.

Baidu is internet hosting its annual Create 2026 developer convention on Could 13–14 in Beijing, the place it plans to showcase ERNIE’s newest industrial purposes. That occasion would be the subsequent knowledge level on how aggressively the corporate intends to push the mannequin into enterprise and international markets.