Baidu launches ERNIE 4.0 at Baidu World 2023

A conference back offline

Baidu World is Baidu's annual showcase for its technology and products, and the 2023 edition was the first to be held offline in four years. It took place in Beijing under the theme "Prompt the World"^[1].

The launch

On 17 October 2023, Baidu CEO Robin Li unveiled ERNIE 4.0 at Baidu World 2023 in Beijing^[1][2]. On stage, Li said the model "is not inferior in any aspect to GPT-4", setting the new version directly against the best-known competing model of the moment^[2]. He also demonstrated ERNIE 4.0 writing a martial-arts novel in real time, showing generation live rather than through a table of benchmark scores^[2].

What Baidu said had changed

Baidu described ERNIE 4.0 as a full upgrade across four capabilities: understanding, generation, reasoning and memory^[1]. Chief technology officer Wang Haifeng said at the event that the model had gained almost 30% in performance since the beta tests in September^[1]. The four-way framing matters because it maps onto the tasks users actually give a chat model — reading a long document, producing text, working through a problem, and keeping track of what was said earlier in a conversation.

Access and pricing

At launch, ERNIE 4.0 was opened to invited ERNIE Bot users, while enterprises could test it through the API on the Qianfan platform^[1]. Commercial terms followed quickly: from 1 November 2023, Baidu charged RMB 59.90 a month for an ERNIE Bot professional plan based on ERNIE 4.0^[3]. The subscription put the newest model behind a consumer price rather than only an enterprise contract, and it made the monthly fee itself part of how the release was discussed.

The platform around the model

The model launch came bundled with numbers about Baidu's wider developer offering. Baidu said its Qianfan foundation model platform hosted 42 foundation models, a set that included both ERNIE models and third-party models^[1]. It also said 27,000 developers had applied to its Plugin Matrix AI Platform within one month of that platform's launch^[1]. Taken together, the message was that ERNIE 4.0 was one component in a stack — models, an API platform, plugins — rather than a single product.

Why it mattered

Three things about the announcement shaped how the release was read. First, the comparison to GPT-4 was made by the CEO himself, on stage, in a single quotable sentence, which turned a technical release into a public claim about relative quality^[2]. Second, the paid professional plan gave the model a visible price, making ERNIE 4.0 the basis of a consumer subscription as well as an enterprise API^[3]. Third, the platform figures — 42 models on Qianfan and 27,000 developer applications to the Plugin Matrix — described an ecosystem strategy in which third parties build on Baidu's infrastructure^[1].

For users, the practical change was that the upgraded model was reachable in two ways at once: through an invitation-gated ERNIE Bot, and through an API that companies could test on Qianfan^[1]. The two paths led to the same underlying model but different arrangements — a consumer product with a monthly fee from November, and an enterprise service sold through a platform that also carried models from other providers^[1][3].