TheTechno Optimist.

ERNIE 5Baidu—ERNIE 5.0 ranks 8th on LMArena's text leaderboard, the only Chinese model in the top 10ERNIE 5Baidu—Baidu unveils ERNIE 5.0, a 2.4-trillion-parameter model for text, images, audio and video, at Baidu World 2025ERNIE 5Baidu—Baidu releases ERNIE 5.1, a third the size of ERNIE 5.0, claiming 6% of the usual pre-training costERNIE 5Baidu—Baidu's Ernie assistant passes 200 million monthly active users

Baidu

ERNIE models, Ernie assistant, AI search

CNpublic~33,500 staffest. 2000Checked 11 Oct

The brief

Analyst view
  • ERNIE 5.0 (2.4 trillion parameters) was the only Chinese model in LMArena's text top 10 in January 2026.
  • ERNIE 5.1 (May 2026) is about a third the size of 5.0; Baidu says pre-training cost about 6% of comparable models.
  • The Ernie assistant had 202 million monthly users in December 2025; Baidu said ERNIE served 16.5 billion API calls a day in January 2026.

Technical approach

As reported
Omni-modal

One model for text, images, sound and video

ERNIE 5.0 is trained on all four kinds of data together from the start, instead of bolting separate vision or audio models onto a text model.

Sparse

A huge model that wakes only a sliver

ERNIE 5 is a mixture of experts: of its 2.4 trillion parameters, under 3% are used for any one answer, which keeps the cost of each reply down.

Elastic

Many model sizes from one training run

ERNIE 5.1 was cut from ERNIE 5.0 with a method that trains many model sizes at once; Baidu claims 6% of comparable pre-training cost.

Distribution

Search as the delivery channel

ERNIE answers inside Baidu Search and the Ernie assistant, which can book flights or order food through apps like JD.com, Meituan and Trip.com.

Primer