Chinese company Baidu has quietly released a model that's just as good as DeepSeek and ChatGPT — ERNIE 4.5 delivers exceptional performance at a fraction of the cost — and most people outside China have never even heard of it.
In this article we’re going to explain what ERNIE 4.5 is, who’s the company behind this Chinese AI model, and how much it costs to use (spoiler — you can chat with ERNIE 4.5 for free on Overchat AI).
Baidu ERNIE 4.5 is a multimodal AI model developed by Baidu, China's leading search engine company.
It’s Baidu's latest generation native multimodal foundation model AI Mode, designed to compete with ChatGPT and DeepSeek V3.
ERNIE 4.5 is multimodal. This means that it can process text, images, audio, and video, making it versatile for any tasks — from translation to creating images.
The model family consists of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models with 47B and 3B active parameters, with the largest model having 424B total parameters ERNIE Blog. The architecture is created in such a way as to enable using specific experts for text and image/video workflows, making it more efficient.
According to Baidu's benchmarks, ERNIE 4.5 achieved an average score of 77.77 on DataCamp, which is roughly in line with GPT-4o performance. The model is particularly strong when it comes to reasoning, coding, and preventing hallucinations.
ERNIE 4.5 makes sense when you need strong multimodal capabilities at a lower cost than Western alternatives. It's particularly useful when you want to work with text, images, audio, and video all in one chat.
When ERNIE 4.5 makes sense:
ERNIE 4.5 was created by Baidu ERNIE Team, which is the internal AI research and development team at Baidu, Inc.
Baidu is China's largest search engine company, often referred to as the "Google of China." Founded in 2000, Baidu began seriously investing in artificial intelligence several years ago and has been developing ERNIE (Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration) since 2019.
Baidu trained the family of models with the PaddlePaddle deep learning framework, which Baidu initially developed and allows for high-performance inference.
Via official Baidu API, here’s how much it costs to use ERNIE :
The above prices are for the non-reasoning version, while ERNIE X1 reasoning model costs are as follows:
If you’re wondering how this compares to competitors, here’s a breakdown:
The API pricing for GPT-5.2 has been set at $1.75 per 1 million input tokens and $14.00 per 1 million output tokens.
For one million tokens, input cache hits now cost $0.028, cache misses $0.28, and outputs $0.42 VentureBeat
This model costs $0.14 per million input tokens (cache hit), $0.55 per million input tokens (cache miss), $2.19 per million output tokens DeepSeek.
The table below visualizes ERINE 4.5 pricing compared to its main competitors:
A few thoughts:
ERNIE 4.5 is more expensive than DeepSeek V3.2 but much cheaper than GPT-5.2.
It closely matches DeepSeek V3.2's pricing but has cheaper outputs. However, under DeepSeek's discounted rates (which apply during 16:30-00:30 UTC each day), the ERNIE thinking variant becomes more expensive. Meanwhile, OpenAI has positioned GPT-5.2 as a premium product making it:
Want to use ERNIE 4.5 for free? Try it on Overchat AI.
The best ways to access ERNIE 4.5 are through:
The easiest way for most people
The simplest way for non-Chinese users to access ERNIE 4.5 is through Overchat AI. Overchat AI gives you free access to this model, and you don’t need a Chinese phone number to use it (which is the case on Baidu’s own website). Thus, you can start chatting immediately without signup, and get up to 50 messages per day on the free tier.
Start chatting with ERNIE 4.5 →
Official Baidu Platform
Baidu's official chatbot platform offers free access to both ERNIE 4.5.
However, registration is limited to Chinese users and requires a Chinese phone number for verification. But if you're based in China or have access to Chinese registration credentials, this is the official route.
Best for developers.
Developers can access ERNIE 4.5 through APIs on Baidu AI Cloud's Qianfan platform. This is ideal for integrating ERNIE into your own applications and products.
ERNIE 4.5 is a powerful AI model from China's and an answer to Western AI models that dominate the market. It’s notable because of a combination of the ability to work with different file types natively, low price, and high accuracy.
Key takeaways:
The biggest question isn't whether ERNIE 4.5 is good — early tests suggest it is — but whether people outside China will adopt it more broadly, but for now, it's a compelling option for cost-conscious users.
