Baidu Unveils Proprietary ERNIE 5 Beating GPT-5 Performance on Charts, Document Understanding and More

Why It Matters

The launch positions Baidu as a serious global competitor in enterprise AI by offering a high‑performance multimodal model at competitive pricing and with both proprietary and open‑source options, potentially drawing enterprise customers away from Western providers and accelerating multimodal AI adoption.

Summary

Baidu announced ERNIE 5.0, a proprietary omni‑modal foundation model that the company claims matches or outperforms OpenAI’s GPT‑5‑High and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro on benchmarks for document understanding, chart reasoning, vision‑language tasks, and language coding. The model is delivered through Baidu’s ERNIE Bot and Qianfan API at a premium price of $0.85 per 1K input tokens and $3.40 per 1K output tokens, roughly comparable to GPT‑5.1 but lower than Claude Opus. At the same event Baidu rolled out upgraded digital‑human services, no‑code tools, AI agents (GenFlow 3.0, Famou, MeDo, Oreate) and announced a push into international markets. Two days earlier it also released an open‑source multimodal model, ERNIE‑4.5‑VL‑28B‑A3B‑Thinking, adding a low‑cost alternative for developers.