Baidu to Unveil Ernie 5.0 Amid Market Shakeup

As emerging firms like DeepSeek disrupt the market, a source indicates that Baidu plans to release the next iteration of its AI model, Ernie 5.0, in the second half of this year. This “foundation model” promises significant advancements in multimodal capabilities, allowing it to process and transform audio, video, images, and texts across different formats.

Foundation models, like Ernie 5.0, can produce text, graphics, and natural language conversations while understanding and performing various language-related tasks.

This release comes amid a rush by Chinese companies to develop advanced AI models to compete with American firms like OpenAI.

DeepSeek’s open-source AI model launch in January caused a global IT stock sell-off, as users were impressed by its reasoning powers and cost-saving potential compared to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

At the World Government Summit in Dubai, Baidu CEO Robin Li highlighted that the inference cost of foundation models could decrease by over 90% within a year, significantly boosting productivity.

Baidu launched Ernie in March 2023, but it has since been overshadowed by other Chinese AI chatbots from companies like ByteDance and Alibaba.

Despite this, Baidu’s shares have risen 6% this year, with Alibaba up 33% and Tencent up 4%.

Baidu’s generative AI, integrated into various business-facing and consumer services like cloud storage and video production, has seen widespread adoption.

The Wenku platform, which reached 40 million paying users by the end of 2024, rolled out new AI-generated presentation features in January 2025.

The latest Ernie model (Generation 4) was released in October 2023, with a “turbo” version (Ernie 4.0) launched in August 2024.

Meanwhile, OpenAI’s GPT-4o was released in May 2024, with no announced timeline for GPT-5.

CNBC