File photo/NBD

With the launch of ERNIE 4.5 and ERNIE X1, Baidu's ERNIE Bot is made free to the public ahead of schedule, and users can access both models free of charge. 

As a deep-thinking reasoning model with multimodal capabilities, ERNIE X1 delivers performance on par with DeepSeek R1 at only half the price.

ERNIE 4.5 is the company's latest foundation model and native multimodal model, with input and output prices starting as low as 0.004 yuan per thousand tokens and RMB 0.016 yuan per thousand tokens.