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Investing.com-- Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) officially launched updated versions of its flagship Ernie artificial intelligence models at a conference on Friday, as the Chinese search engine giant grapples with an increasingly competitive AI sector.
Baidu CEO Robin Li unveiled Ernie 4.5 Turbo and Ernie X1 Turbo at a developer conference in Wuhan.
Ernie 4.5 Turbo is Baidu’s flagship foundation model, while the X1 series, which debuted in March, is the company’s flagship reasoning model.
Li demonstrated 4.5 Turbo’s advanced capabilities at the conference, which now includes integration with Baidu cloud, increased memory capabilities, stronger reasoning, and fewer hallucinations.
The Baidu CEO also touted the AI model’s ability to create and operate digital AI agents, which can be used in a variety of applications.
The new launch is in line with Baidu’s goal of rapidly advancing its AI development, in the face of heightened competition from local majors such as DeepSeek, Alibaba (NYSE:BABA), and Bytedance.
The company is among the biggest Chinese investors in AI, and had also started spending on the technology well before its local peers. But so far, Baidu has lagged its rivals in market share, with Aibaba’s Quark and ByteDance’s Doubao courting far more monthly users.
Still, Baidu and its Chinese peers’ AI ambitions may face a roadblock from the U.S. cutting off the supply of AI chips to the country. AI major Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) recently said it faced even more restrictions on its AI chip sales to China.
But to that end, Baidu said it had successfully established a cluster of 30,000 Chinese-made processors, which will be sufficient for training more AI models.
Baidu’s Hong Kong shares rose as much as 4% on Friday, underpinning a 1% jump in the Hang Seng.