ERNIE 4.5

What it is

ERNIE 4.5 (文心大模型 4.5) is a foundation model that Baidu released on 16 March 2025, alongside the reasoning model ERNIE X1. Baidu called it a native multimodal foundation model that handles text, images, audio and video.^[1]

Capabilities

Baidu cited improvements in understanding, generation, reasoning, memory, hallucination prevention, logical reasoning and coding. It said the model could understand internet memes and satirical cartoons.^[1]

Key technologies named by Baidu include FlashMask dynamic attention masking and a heterogeneous multimodal mixture-of-experts architecture.^[1]

Baidu's charts showed ERNIE 4.5 ahead of GPT-4o, GPT-4.5 and DeepSeek-V3 on C-Eval, CMMLU, GSM8K and DROP. The charts showed it behind GPT-4.5 on MMLU-Pro, GPQA and LiveCodeBench.^[2]

Pricing and access

At launch, ERNIE 4.5 was free for individual users on ERNIE Bot. It was available by API through Baidu AI Cloud's Qianfan platform. The API launch price was RMB 0.004 per thousand input tokens and RMB 0.016 per thousand output tokens. Baidu said the model outperformed GPT-4.5 on multiple benchmarks at about 1% of GPT-4.5's price.^[1]

Baidu planned to integrate ERNIE 4.5 into Baidu Search and the Wenxiaoyan app.^[1]

Open-sourcing

On 30 June 2025 Baidu open-sourced the ERNIE 4.5 family of ten models under the Apache License 2.0, reversing its earlier closed approach.^[3][4][5]

The open family includes two language mixture-of-experts models, ERNIE-4.5-300B-A47B and ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B. It also includes two vision-language mixture-of-experts models, ERNIE-4.5-VL-424B-A47B and ERNIE-4.5-VL-28B-A3B, and a 0.3-billion-parameter dense model. Each comes in base and post-trained versions.^[3]

The flagship ERNIE-4.5-300B-A47B has 300 billion total and 47 billion activated parameters, 54 layers, 64 text experts and 64 vision experts, with 8 of each activated per token. It supports a 131,072-token context and is built on PaddlePaddle with FP8 mixed-precision training.^[6]

Baidu reported that the ERNIE-4.5-300B-A47B-Base model beat DeepSeek-V3-671B-A37B-Base on 22 of 28 benchmarks. It also said its largest pre-training run reached 47% model FLOPs utilization.^[3]

The models were released with the ERNIEKit training toolkit and the FastDeploy deployment toolkit, and were added to Qianfan.^[4][7]

Later versions

On 25 April 2025 Baidu launched ERNIE 4.5 Turbo at 80% lower price. ERNIE 4.5 also served as the base of ERNIE X1.1, released in September 2025.^[8][9]