Baidu launches ERNIE X1 Turbo at half X1's price

Background

ERNIE X1 was Baidu's reasoning model, released in March 2025. A reasoning model spends extra steps working through a problem before it answers, and its chain of thought is the sequence of those intermediate steps. Developers who build on such a model care about two things: how well it reasons and how much each request costs. A Turbo version is a follow-up release aimed at improving one or both of these, and the ERNIE X1 Turbo release was framed around both.

What happened

Baidu released ERNIE X1 Turbo on 25 April 2025 at Create 2025 in Wuhan.^[1] The company said the model has a more advanced chain of thought than ERNIE X1, along with stronger multimodal and tool-invocation abilities.^[1] Baidu claimed it outperforms DeepSeek-R1 and the latest DeepSeek-V3.^[1]

Key details

Pricing was RMB 1 per million input tokens and RMB 4 per million output tokens. That is half the price of ERNIE X1, and 25% of the price of DeepSeek-R1.^[1] AI News converted these prices to $0.14 per million input tokens and $0.55 per million output tokens.^[2] Both Turbo models, ERNIE 4.5 Turbo and ERNIE X1 Turbo, were free to use on ERNIE Bot.^[1]

Impact

X1 Turbo was launched alongside ERNIE 4.5 Turbo, so the lower prices applied to both the general model line and the reasoning model line in the same release.^[1]

Tool invocation means a model can decide to call an external function, such as a search or a code runner, and use the result in its answer. Model prices are quoted per million tokens, so a difference of a few RMB per million tokens becomes a visible cost once an application handles millions of requests. Turbo versions are often compared on both price and reasoning quality, which is why the two claims in Baidu's announcement, lower cost and better results, were presented together.