ERNIE 4.0

What it is

ERNIE 4.0 is a foundation model from Baidu, presented at release as the company's most powerful one, with what Baidu described as major gains in understanding, generation, reasoning and memory^[1]. Like other foundation models, it is a large neural network trained on broad data and then adapted to many downstream tasks; the release itself focuses on how much better the new version is than its predecessors rather than on architecture details.

Launch

Robin Li unveiled the model on 17 October 2023 at Baidu World 2023 in Beijing, the conference's first offline edition in four years, held under the theme "Prompt the World"^[1].

CTO Wang Haifeng said overall performance had improved by almost 30% since beta testing began in September 2023^[1]. The release does not name the benchmark or measure behind that figure, so the number cannot be checked against a public test set from the announcement alone^[1].

Li went further in public, claiming the model "is not inferior in any aspect to GPT-4"^[2].

What it could do

Live demonstrations at the event included writing a martial-arts novel and producing advertising posters and videos^[2]. Engadget reported that at Baidu World 2023 the model also created a multimodal car commercial in a few minutes from a short text prompt, solved complex geometry problems, and refined a short story on the spot^[2]. Such demos show the intended range — text, image and video output, plus reasoning-heavy tasks such as geometry — rather than independent measurements of quality.

Availability and pricing

At launch, ERNIE 4.0 was available to invited users through the ERNIE Bot assistant. Enterprise customers could apply for API testing on Baidu's Qianfan foundation-model platform, which at the time hosted 42 models^[1]; Baidu said Qianfan covers more than 500 use scenarios^[1].

From 1 November 2023, the ERNIE Bot professional plan built on ERNIE 4.0 cost RMB 59.90 per month, or RMB 49.90 with auto-renewal, and added image generation and plug-ins^[3]. The subscription format put the most capable version of the assistant behind a paid tier while the free product continued on earlier models.

Later changes

By April 2024, ERNIE 4.0 Tool inside ERNIE Bot added a code interpreter for data analysis, charts and documents^[4]. In June 2024 Baidu followed with ERNIE 4.0 Turbo, which it said was faster and cheaper than ERNIE 4.0^[5]. On 4 September 2024, when the app was renamed Wenxiaoyan, ERNIE 4.0 was made free for all users for the rest of the month^[6].

Read together, these steps trace a familiar curve for a flagship model: a paid early phase, then cheaper and faster variants, then wider free access as attention shifted to newer versions. ERNIE 4.0 sits at the point where Baidu began positioning its assistant as a general-purpose tool for consumers and as an API product for companies at the same time.