Baidu Inc. released a new artificial intelligence model that articulates its reasoning, in an apparent bid to regain momentum against up-and-coming rivals like DeepSeek.The Ernie X1 model by China’s internet search leader works similarly to DeepSeek R1 — which shocked Silicon Valley by offering comparable performance to the world’s best chatbots at a fraction of their development cost.

DeepSeek has emerged as the new standard for AI model makers to beat after launching R1 just before Christmas. As a reasoning model, R1 stood out for matching the capabilities of the best U.S.-made AI models, despite its maker only spending a small fraction of the cost its rivals had spent in training it.

Tech giant says reasoning model Ernie X1 ‘delivers performance on par with DeepSeek R1 at only half the price’.