Baidu reportedly plans to release a new edition of its artificial intelligence chatbot Ernie later this year, as Chinese AI companies continue to disrupt the AI market.
Ernie 5.0 will have “big enhancements in multimodal capabilities”, according to CNBC. This would allow it to combine text, videos, images, and audio, as well as convert between formats.
Baidu CEO Robin Li also called for more investment in AI infrastructure this week. ”When technology is still evolving at such a rapid rate, you just cannot stop investing. You have to invest to make sure that you are at the very front of this technological innovation or revolution,” Li said.
The next edition of Ernie is reportedly slated to release in the second half of 2025. Ernie 4.0 launched in October 2023, with a major update rolling out in August 2024, and will be free to use from 1 April.
China’s AI ecosystem has seen rapid advancements so far this year, with DeepSeek’s first free chatbot rocketing to the top of the iOS App Store upon its launch last month. DeepSeek’s rise temporarily heavily dented stocks like Nvidia due to its low-cost, open-source development, though OpenAI has alleged DeepSeek was trained on its models without permission.
ByteDance released its OmniHuman-1 model this week, which can generate videos based on reference images or audios.
Alibaba also unveiled a new model, Qwen 2.5-Max, last month. According to the company, Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Meta’s Llama.
Apple reportedly chose Baidu as a partner to build AI iPhone features for the Chinese market, but exited the deal when Baidu’s progress lagged behind Apple’s goals. The company is instead developing these tools with Alibaba.
Baidu’s share price (NASDAQ: BIDU) closed at US$93.34, up from its previous close at $89.44. Its market capitalisation is $31.96 billion.
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