BIDU-SW (09888.HK)  -0.350 (-0.400%)    Short selling $56.38M; Ratio 18.095%   (BIDU.US)      held its Create2025 AI Developer Conference in Wuhan today (25th), themed “Models Lead, APPs Rule”. Founder, Chairman, and CEO Robin Li announced the official launch of foundation models, Ernie 4.5 Turbo and Ernie X1 Turbo.

Li emphasized that Ernie 4.5 Turbo and Ernie X1 Turbo feature multimodality, strong reasoning, and low cost. He highlighted multimodality as the future standard for foundation models, driven by current user demand, and predicted continued growth in the multimodal market while demand for pure text models will subside.

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Li noted that March 16, 2025 marked the two-year anniversary of the Ernie model’s release, when Ernie 4.5 and Ernie X1 were launched. The new Ernie 4.5 Turbo and Ernie X1 Turbo are priced 80% and 50% below their predecessors, respectively.

Ernie 4.5 Turbo’s pricing is RMB0.8 per million tokens for input and RMB3.2 for output, merely 40% of DeepSeek V3’s API cost. Meanwhile, Ernie X1 Turbo is priced at RMB1 per million tokens for input and RMB4 for output, 25% of DeepSeek R1’s API cost.
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