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What is ERNIE 4.5?
ERNIE 4.5 is Baidu's open-source AI language model. It’s part of the Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration series. ERNIE 4.5 is widely considered one the best Chinese open source AI models, often compared against DeepSeek V3. It’s known for low cost, quick and accurate responses, and ability to interpret images and text accurately.
ERNIE 4.5 developer Baidu is the largest search engine company in China, occupying a position similar to that of Alphabet in the rest of the world. Baidu's AI research team is renowned for its efficient training methodology, which enables the creation of powerful AI models using a fraction of the budget and processing power available to Western rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Like other AI models, ERNIE 4.5 can understand human language, generate new text that sounds human-written, and reason about complex topics internally. It can be used for maths, homework, or simply chatting with AI online.
ERNIE 4.5 Features
ERNIE 4.5 offers multilingual support — it speaks English and Chinese particularly well, though it also understands other languages: Spanish, German, French, Italian, Indonesian and many others.
Compared to previous ERNIE generations, the 4.5 version of the AI chatbot features improved reasoning, better factual accuracy, and many users note its improved creative writing ability (although this is subjective).
Another feature that makes ERNIE 4.5 special is its licensing model. Baidu is well known for its open-source models, but in 2025 the company changed its strategy and released ERNIE 4.5 under the Apache 2.0 licence. This means the model is completely free for anyone to use commercially anywhere in the world.
This followed the success of DeepSeek, which proved that open-source AI models could compete with proprietary ones. The PaddlePaddle-ERNIE ecosystem now supports more than 23 million developers and 760,000 businesses worldwide.
However, unlike DeepSeek, which is easily accessible on the official website or on Overchat AI, ERNIE has less developed infrastructure for casual users and is subject to more geo-blocks than its counterpart. If you’re not based in China, Overchat AI is one of the simplest ways to access ERNIE-4.5-VL from Baidu, aside from running it locally on your machine.
ERNIE 4.5 Benchmarks
ERNIE 4.5's 300B version beats DeepSeek V3 on 22 out of 28 benchmarks despite being half the size — a testament to Baidu's efficient architecture design.
More AI Models by Baidu
ERNIE 4.5 is part of Baidu's broader ecosystem of ERNIE AI models, which includes ERNIE X1.1 — a deep-thinking model and ERNIE 5.0 — Baidu's 2.4 trillion parameter newest flagship model.
