Baidu: ERNIE Models, PaddlePaddle and AI Cloud

A model developer with its own framework and cloud

Baidu’s AI work spans cloud infrastructure, its PaddlePaddle deep-learning framework, ERNIE foundation models and applications. Its search and mobile services sit alongside enterprise AI Cloud products and ERNIE Bot, connecting model development to both consumer and developer services. [1]

The March 2025 introduction of ERNIE 4.5 and X1 supplied hosted chatbot access, with ERNIE 4.5 also offered through Qianfan APIs. Downloadable weights followed in a separate June 30 release. That release included ten text and vision-language variants, from a 0.3B dense model to a 424B-total-parameter mixture-of-experts model, under Apache 2.0. [2][3][4]

Baidu also published development toolkits for the ERNIE 4.5 family and used PaddlePaddle for training and deployment. This contribution includes model artifacts and the software around them; the release’s comparative benchmark results are Baidu’s evaluations, rather than independent proof of superiority. [3]