Baidu launches Ernie 5.0 as the firm’s AI assistant users reach 200 million a month
The Beijing-based company’s most advanced AI model can process text, images, audio and video
Baidu on Thursday unveiled Ernie 5.0, a multimodal artificial intelligence model with 2.4 trillion parameters, as use of the Chinese tech giant’s AI-powered namesake assistant climbed to 200 million monthly active users.
The omni-modal foundation model, capable of processing text, images, audio and video, is the Beijing-based company’s most advanced to date.
The model was first previewed in November and has since climbed the rankings. A leaderboard published last week by LMArena showed Ernie-5.0-0110 ranked first among Chinese models and eighth globally in text performance, ahead of leading US models such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.1-High and Google’s Gemini-2.5-Pro.
Baidu’s new model relies on an ultra-large mixture-of-experts architecture with highly sparse activation, meaning it uses less than 3 per cent of its parameters per inference to improve efficiency without sacrificing performance.
The company’s chip subsidiary, Kunlunxin Technology, confidentially filed for a Hong Kong initial public offering earlier this month, as Beijing’s push for technological self-reliance, particularly in frontier sectors such as semiconductors, intensified amid wider adoption and fresh capital market momentum.
China’s AI models might be “six months behind” the capabilities of their US counterparts, said Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday.