ERNIE

ERNIE (文心) is Baidu's large-model family: the 2023 chatbot 文心一言 (ERNIE Bot) was Baidu's ChatGPT answer, pitched as a knowledge-enhanced LLM strong on Chinese-language understanding, with retrieval and dialogue augmentation, spanning NLP, CV, multimodal and industry-specific models . The technical line continued — in mid-2025 Baidu open-sourced the ERNIE 4.5 series, ten models from 0.3B upward with markedly stronger multimodal understanding — but market reception has soured: a July 2026 葬AI piece mocked ERNIE 5.1 for scoring dead-last on its benchmark (4 of 10 tasks outright failing) and noted Baidu's messaging has pivoted from foundation models to "agents and deployment" . In short, ERNIE is the product line Baidu launched earliest and loudest in China's LLM race, and the one now most often cited as evidence of how far the company has slipped in it.