Baidu Unveils Cost-Effective AI Models and Agent App at Wuhan Conference
At its Create 2025 conference in Wuhan, Baidu reinforced its strategy focusing on AI applications over foundational models. CEO Robin Li introduced two new large language models, Ernie 4.5 Turbo and X1 Turbo, positioning them as significantly cheaper alternatives to competitor DeepSeek’s offerings. Ernie 4.5 Turbo is priced at 40% of DeepSeek V3 rates, while X1 Turbo costs just 25% of DeepSeek R1 prices. Baidu also launched Xinxiang, a mobile AI agent app competing with Manus, which currently supports 200 task types with plans to scale to 100,000. The company emphasized the shift toward multimodal capabilities and announced support for the Model Capability Protocol (MCP) to foster an open ecosystem, allowing third-party developers to build within Baidu’s search engine. Despite industry-wide adoption of MCP by rivals like Alibaba and Tencent, Li argued that superior applications will ultimately drive market success. The event featured major tech partners including Intel and NVIDIA and launched an AI app competition with 70 million RMB in prizes to stimulate developer innovation.
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Baidu Unveils Cost-Effective AI Models and Agent App at Wuhan Conference
At its Create 2025 conference in Wuhan, Baidu reinforced its strategy focusing on AI applications over foundational models. CEO Robin Li introduced two new large language models, Ernie 4.5 Turbo and X1 Turbo, positioning them as significantly cheaper alternatives to competitor DeepSeek’s offerings. Ernie 4.5 Turbo is priced at 40% of DeepSeek V3 rates, while X1 Turbo costs just 25% of DeepSeek R1 prices. Baidu also launched Xinxiang, a mobile AI agent app competing with Manus, which currently supports 200 task types with plans to scale to 100,000. The company emphasized the shift toward multimodal capabilities and announced support for the Model Capability Protocol (MCP) to foster an open ecosystem, allowing third-party developers to build within Baidu’s search engine. Despite industry-wide adoption of MCP by rivals like Alibaba and Tencent, Li argued that superior applications will ultimately drive market success. The event featured major tech partners including Intel and NVIDIA and launched an AI app competition with 70 million RMB in prizes to stimulate developer innovation.
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