Baidu’s ERNIE-4.5-VL-28B-A3B-Thinking landed on November 11, shaking up the industry with claims of outperforming OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro.
The new model uses an advanced Mixture-of-Experts architecture, activating only 3 billion of 28 billion parameters per inference.
This innovation allows ERNIE-4.5 to deliver fast multimodal reasoning, document and image understanding, and cutting-edge STEM logic, all while minimizing compute costs.
China’s aggressive open-source push redefines the competition between East and West in high-performance artificial intelligence.
How does ERNIE-4.5's architectural design boost its performance?
Baidu’s ERNIE-4.5 employs a Mixture-of-Experts structure, meaning each inference only activates the most relevant three billion parameters while keeping access to a much larger knowledge pool.
This dynamic routing not only cuts computational load but also increases inference speed, with two to three times faster operation than fully dense models of similar scale.
The architecture is tuned for multimodal tasks, enabling seamless switching between visual, language, and cross-modal reasoning.
By architecting experts specialized for different data types, ERNIE-4.5 enhances visual grounding, context understanding, and the ability to reason over charts, documents, and videos.
Baidu’s design ensures the model draws only on the most relevant expert knowledge for each query, resulting in agile, cost-effective intelligence at scale.
Did you know?
ERNIE-4.5 models can process content spanning up to 131,072 tokens, enabling analysis of very large documents or videos.
What benchmarks prove ERNIE-4.5’s edge over GPT-5 and Gemini?
ERNIE-4.5’s superiority is demonstrated in several multimodal evaluation benchmarks, notably VQA (Visual Question Answering), MMBench for multilingual AI understanding, and SEED-Bench for generative comprehension tasks.
In head-to-head comparisons, ERNIE-4.5 routinely scores equal to or above both GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro, particularly in document reasoning, chart analysis, and image understanding.
Its “Thinking with Images” feature further boosts performance by enabling the model to zoom into image regions and aggregate local observations for nuanced answers.
The benchmarks reveal that activating fewer, highly specialized parameters enables ERNIE-4.5 to match or exceed results from Western flagship models while significantly improving inference speeds.
This opens up the possibility of large-scale deployment in real-time environments without the typical heavy hardware requirements.
Why is open source crucial for China’s AI strategy?
China’s leading AI firms, including Baidu, DeepSeek, and Alibaba, are shifting toward open-source models under permissive licenses like Apache 2.0. The ERNIE-4.5 release signals a strategic move to encourage global adoption, developer participation, and rapid iteration on its technology.
Publicly released models are easier to deploy, customize, and integrate into industry solutions worldwide, helping Chinese companies build mindshare beyond domestic markets.
As Sean Ren of USC notes, every powerful open-source drop raises the bar for the entire AI industry, forcing proprietary API providers like OpenAI and Anthropic to rethink premium pricing and closed access.
This push is already shifting global AI download trends, with China now outpacing the United States in open-source AI downloads, enabling rapid evolution and accessibility.
ALSO READ | Why is China racing to dominate space with 72 launches this year
Does ERNIE-4.5 set new standards for multimodal reasoning?
The focus on reasoning across both text and visual modalities positions ERNIE-4.5 as a leader in solving real-world analytical challenges.
Its mid-training phase involved massive visual-language reasoning data, along with reinforcement learning strategies such as GSPO and IcePop to improve learning efficiency on hard examples.
This allows the model to excel at tasks such as STEM problem-solving, document understanding, and complex image analysis.
Its support for up to 131,072 tokens means ERNIE-4.5 can process long documents and extended videos, a capability rare even among top-tier models.
Combined with state-of-the-art visual grounding and tool utilization, ERNIE-4.5 expands what multimodal AI can achieve from enterprise analytics to advanced creative tasks.
What could ERNIE-4.5 mean for global AI competition?
ERNIE-4.5’s combination of lightweight design, high performance, and open-source accessibility is forcing a reset in global AI rivalry.
By delivering benchmark results at lower inference cost, Baidu is chipping away at the “scale equals quality” mindset that has dominated Western AI for years.
The move highlights an era in which agility, efficiency, and openness may outpace mere parameter size as drivers of innovation.
As Baidu prepares to showcase its ERNIE lineup at Baidu World 2025, Western companies face pressure to respond with more advanced, affordable, and customizable offerings.
For developers, businesses, and policymakers worldwide, the ERNIE-4.5 release marks a critical moment in the evolution of global AI, inviting new participation and driving forward capabilities in vision-language intelligence.
Comments (0)
Please sign in to leave a comment