Following the release of two models in mid-March, Baidu unveiled ERNIE 4.5 Turbo and ERNIE X1 Turbo today, which stand out for their multimodal capabilities, strong reasoning, and low costs. ERNIE 4.5 Turbo delivers faster responses while priced at 20% of ERNIE 4.5; ERNIE X1 Turbo, featuring enhanced capabilities, is half the price of ERNIE X1.
In addition to the models, Baidu also unveiled an array of AI applications, including Xinxiang, a multi-agent collaboration app, enabling full task delivery from a single sentence prompt, as well as highly convincing digital humans.
Baidu also announced an AI Open Initiative as well as the integration of MCP into some existing products to enable effortless experience for the developers to access and utilize Baidu's suite of services.
WUHAN, China, April 25, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Baidu, Inc. (NASDAQ: BIDU and HKEX: 9888), a leading AI company with a strong internet foundation, today introduced a new suite of AI innovations at its annual developer conference Baidu Create 2025. At the event, Baidu co-founder and CEO Robin Li introduced ERNIE 4.5 Turbo and ERNIE X1 Turbo, the latest two models of the company, along with a series of AI applications and advancements, and committed to empowering developers to fully embrace MCP (Model Context Protocol).
"Our releases aim to empower developers to build the best applications — without having to worry about model capability, costs, or development tools," Li said in his keynote, addressing an audience of over 5,000 developers and tech enthusiasts. "Without practical applications, neither advanced chips nor sophisticated models hold value. While there will be a multitude of models, it is the applications that will truly dominate in the future. Applications are where true power lies," Li added.
ERNIE 4.5 Turbo and ERNIE X1 Turbo: Faster and Cheaper
Baidu introduced ERNIE 4.5 Turbo and ERNIE X1 Turbo at Create 2025, both of which feature enhanced multimodal capabilities, strong reasoning, low costs, and are available for users to access on ERNIE Bot now free of charge. The two models were launched to address common pain points in the industry, including single-modality, high-hallucination, slow-response and high-price, Li noted.
ERNIE X1 Turbo is an upgraded deep thinking reasoning model. Featuring a more advanced chain of thought, stronger deep thinking capabilities, and further enhanced multimodal and tool invocation abilities, it excels in Q&A, literary creation, and logical reasoning, outperforming DeepSeek R1 as well as the latest version of V3.
ERNIE X1 Turbo offers improved performance while being priced at half of ERNIE X1, making it only 25% of the price of DeepSeek R1. The input price is RMB 1 per million tokens, and the output price is RMB 4 per million tokens.
ERNIE 4.5 Turbo demonstrates overall progress in hallucination reduction, logical reasoning, and coding abilities, with faster response. The multimodal capabilities of ERNIE 4.5 Turbo are on par with GPT-4.1 and superior to GPT-4o across multiple benchmarks. For ERNIE 4.5 Turbo, the input price is only RMB 0.8 per million tokens, and the output price is RMB 3.2 per million tokens, 80% off the price of ERNIE 4.5, 0.2% of GPT-4.5 and 40% of DeepSeek V3.
Both ERNIE 4.5 Turbo and X1 Turbo have further enhanced their multimodal capabilities. "Multimodality will become a standard feature of future foundation models. The market for pure text-based models will shrink, while the market for multimodal models will continue to grow," Li predicted in his keynote.
The two models follow the launch of ERNIE 4.5, the company's first native multimodal foundation model, and ERNIE X1, a multimodal deep-thinking reasoning model capable of tool use, both of which received strong market recognition after their debut on March 16, 2025.
AI Application Frontrunners: Highly Convincing Digital Humans and Multi-agent Tool Xinxiang
The highly convincing digital human is one of the key applications that exemplify the capabilities of multimodality. "AI digital humans are one of the most exciting breakthrough applications in 2025," Li said in his speech.
Li introduced Baidu's highly convincing AI digital human, which features ultra-realistic voice and appearance, as well as more professional content-generation and more flexible interactions. Baidu's Huiboxing, a digital human livestream platform powered by AI, now offers a feature to create a digital human in one click where users can upload a video as short as two minutes before the system can generate a personalized digital human ready to go live.
Over the past year, agents have transitioned from a niche concept to a core field of AI applications. Notably, coding agents have rapidly gained traction, with Baidu offering tools like Comate for code assistance and Miaoda, a no-code platform for multi-agent collaboration. In March, Miaoda was made available to the public, allowing users to generate applications with a single sentence.
"There are nearly 30 million programmers and 8 billion people globally. As technologies become more accessible, everyone can possess the capabilities of a programmer," said Li.
At the event, Baidu also officially released the multi-agent collaboration app Xinxiang, a "general super agent" capable of solving complex problems for users in a one-stop manner. Currently, Xinxiang covers 200 task types in scenarios such as knowledge-analysis, travel-planning, studying, and office work. In the future, Baidu plans to expand the number of task types to over 100,000.
Li also introduced Cangzhou OS, the first content operating system jointly launched by Baidu Wenku and Baidu Drive. Powered by Cangzhou OS, Baidu Drive has launched AI Note, the industry's first multimodal AI note-taking tool. Users can generate quick notes, mind maps, and quizzes from watching educational videos with just a single click.
To date, Baidu Wenku's AI features have amassed 40 million paying users and 97 million monthly active users (MAUs), while Baidu Drive's AI features serve more than 80 million MAUs.
Building a Thriving Ecosystem: AI Open Initiative, MCP and ERNIE Cup
Addressing the booming AI application market, Baidu introduced a series of initiatives aimed at supporting AI developers in adapting to the emerging trend.
Baidu Search Open Platform has launched the AI Open Initiative (sai.baidu.com), providing developers of AI agents, H5 pages, mini programs, and standalone apps with traffic and monetization opportunities, as well as access to the latest AI services through a diversified content and service distribution system.
Also at the event, Baidu announced full support to enable developers to adopt Model Context Protocol (MCP). Li compared MCP to installing a "universal socket" for AI — enabling seamless connections between external services and large models through standardized interfaces. Live demos showcased the integration of MCP across a series of Baidu proprietary services, including the Baidu Qianfan Foundation Model Platform, Baidu Search, e-commerce, and Baidu Drive.
To further support innovation in AI, Baidu announced the third ERNIE Cup Innovation Challenge at Create 2025. This year's challenge will double the prize amounts from previous years, offering up to RMB 70 million in investment for outstanding projects.
At the same time, Baidu announced that over the next five years, the company will scale up its efforts to cultivate an additional 10 million AI talents for society.
Baidu Create is Baidu's annual tech event for the developer community, serving as a platform for technology launches and knowledge exchange. This year's conference centered around the theme of "Models Lead, APPs Rule" and featured six sub-forums on subjects such as MCP, agents, DeepSeek and more.
About Baidu
Founded in 2000, Baidu's mission is to make the complicated world simpler through technology. Baidu is a leading AI company with strong internet foundation, trading on the NASDAQ under "BIDU" and HKEX under "9888." One Baidu ADS represents eight Class A ordinary shares.
