Baidu has just launched a new AI model that competes with the best. The surprise: it is not Open Source

Baidu has presented Ernie X1.1, a new generative model that represents a promising qualitative leap and that seems to compete from you to you with their rivals. That is not so surprising. What it is is that we are facing a model that goes against the Chinese trend: it is closed.

Why is it important. Being “the Chinese Google” worked very well for Baidu for more than two decades, but in recent times this Chinese technological giant is trying to Do not lose commits in the AI ​​race. His last movement goes in that direction: Ernie X1.1 has just presented, the latest version of a reasoning model that earns whole. The model can be easily tested in the Official Chatbot Website (You have to display the option to use the Ernie X1.1 model if you are not selected).

The new Ernie X1.1 competes from you to you with Depseek-R1, Gemini-2.5 Pro and even GPT-5 in various benchmarks

Promising. The internal tests published by BAIDU reveal that their new reasoning model offers “significant advances” in terms of precision of the answers (34.8% better than Ernie X1), instructions monitoring (12.5% ​​better) and agricultural capacities (9.6% better). Not only that: its performance in Benchmarks exceeds Desepseek R1-0528, the reference AI model for months in China. It is also able to compete in performance with GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro, two of the most advanced models today.

But closed. While the trend in China is to offer open models in which at least the weights with which these models have trained, Baidu has decided that at the moment Ernie X1.1 will be closed. The model has been offered to corporate clients already developers through the Baidu cloud platform, called Qianfan (via API), in addition to its aforementioned availability in Ernie.baidu.com.

Meanwhile, other models open. What it has done is to open the Ernie-4.5-21B-A3B-Thinking model, a version that is somewhat less capable but that has reasoning capacity and that supports a context window of 128,000 tokens. This model uses a MOE (Mixture of Experts) architecture with 21,000 million total parameters although only 3,000 million of them are active to make it more efficient. The model is for example available Through Hugging Face.

An AI that accompanies the elderly. As they point out In SCMPduring the presentation of this wang haifeng model, Cto de Baidu, advertisement The launch of an AI agent destined to accompany the elderly. The objective is to help the more than 310 million Chinese who are over 60 years offering information that for example can help them with their health status and also allows us to discern whether the information they find on the Internet can be harmful to them.

Counting Erres. In Xataka we have been able to use Ernie X1.1 for a few hours and the first impressions are very positive. The reasoning model is especially careful when answering, and for example when asking “how many” R “does the phrase ‘the San Roque dog has no tail because Ramón Ramírez has stolen it’?” The model correctly replied that 9, when Ernie 4.5, also available on that website, replied quickly but badly: 8.

We also ask you to create a table with the 10 countries that had won the most football, and once again The answer It was perfect, something we had not seen in almost any previous model. In other interactions – for example, when creating and analyzing Python code – the performance was also remarkable. In the absence of trying it in depth, these small tests point to a really remarkable behavior of the model.

But rivals squeeze. We are therefore before a striking step by Baidu, both for that promising performance and for the fact that the company has given up not opening it for the moment. In front of Ernie X1.1, yes, the competition is fierce. Both QWen3-Max-Preview (Alibaba) and Kimi-K2-0905 (MoNshot) have achieved enter the list Of the 10 most powerful models on the market According to LMarena. There for those who lead are Gemini-2.5 Pro, Claude Opus 4.1, O3 and GPT-5-High, but the advance of these Chinese models is remarkable. It remains to be seen if Ernie X1.1 will also sneak that list.

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