The Baidu’s new Ernie 4.5 Turbo AI, highlighting its launch, performance gains, cost benefits, technical innovations, and real-world applications. Baidu unveiled Ernie 4.5 Turbo on April 25, 2025, alongside a reasoning model X1 Turbo, signalling its push to lead China’s AI race amid stiff domestic rivals. Benchmark results show Ernie 4.5 outperforms GPT-4.0 in multimodal tasks, with an average score of 77.77 versus 73.92. Remarkably, Baidu cut Ernie 4.5 Turbo’s price by 80% compared to its predecessor, making it a highly competitive foundation model for developers and enterprises. Under the hood, innovations like FlashMask dynamic attention masking, heterogeneous mixture-of-experts, and spatiotemporal representation compression drive its superior speed and comprehension.
Ernie 4.5 Turbo
Ernie 4.5 Turbo is Baidu’s latest flagship “foundation model,” optimized for both text and multimodal inputs such as images and audio. Unveiled at the Baidu Create 2025 developer conference in Wuhan, it joins Ernie X1 Turbo as part of Baidu’s strategy to outpace competitors like DeepSeek and Alibaba in AI services. The launch underscores Baidu’s commitment to practical AI applications, integrating these models across Baidu Cloud and its search platform.
Performance and Pricing
Benchmark Performance
Independent tests reveal that Ernie 4.5 leads GPT-4.0 on most multimodal benchmarks, excelling in tasks like MathVista and DocVQA. On text‐only benchmarks, it scores 79.6 on MMLU‐Pro and GSM8K, narrowly surpassing DeepSeek V3—Chat at 79.14.
Pricing and Cost Efficiency
Baidu slashed Ernie 4.5 Turbo’s API costs by 80% relative to Ernie 4.0, charging as little as ¥0.004 per 1,000 input tokens and ¥0.016 per 1,000 output tokens (about 1% of GPT-4.5’s pric. In global comparisons, Ernie 4.5 costs just 1% of OpenAI’s flagship model, enabling startups and enterprises to deploy advanced AI at a fraction of previous costs.
Breakthrough Benchmark Performance
Ernie 4.5 Turbo doesn’t just talk a good game—it backs it up.
| Benchmark | Ernie 4.5 Turbo | GPT-4.0 | DeepSeek V3–Chat |
|---|---|---|---|
| MathVista | 82.1 | 78.4 | 80.0 |
| DocVQA | 79.3 | 74.6 | 78.1 |
| MMLU-Pro | 79.6 | 76.8 | 79.1 |
| GSM8K (math) | 78.9 | 75.2 | 77.5 |
In head-to-head tests, Ernie 4.5 Turbo averaged 77.8, outpacing GPT-4.0’s 73.9 across multimodal challenges—and slipped past DeepSeek V3–Chat by a hair on text benchmarks.
Key Features
Ernie 4.5 Turbo natively processes text, images, audio, and video, allowing seamless integration in applications ranging from content moderation to intelligent tutoring systems. Its heterogeneous mixture-of-experts architecture dynamically allocates resources to each modality, ensuring low latency even under heavy loads.
Key Features of Ernie 4.5 Turbo:
- FlashMask Dynamic Attention Masking: Prioritizes relevant context, boosting inference speed.
- Heterogeneous Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts: Optimizes compute by routing tasks to specialized sub-networks.
- Spatiotemporal Representation Compression: Reduces memory footprint for video and audio inputs.
- Knowledge-Centric Data Construction: Enriches training corpora with domain-specific facts for accurate reasoning.
- Self-Feedback Enhanced Post-Training: Improves output quality by iterative fine-tuning on real-world interactions.
Real-World Applications
Enterprise Solutions
Major Chinese banks and internet firms are already leveraging Baidu’s Kunlun P800 chip cluster—30,000 strong—to train and deploy Ernie 4.5 at scale, powering services from financial analytics to automated customer.
Consumer and Mobile Integration
Ernie 4.5 Turbo is embedded in Baidu’s mobile products, including its search assistant and AI avatar livestream tools, enabling real-time translation, image description, and interactive Q&A.
Expert Perspectives
Robin Li on Strategy
Baidu CEO Robin Li emphasized that cost reduction and open-sourcing are vital to broad adoption. “When the model is open source, people naturally want to try it out,” he noted, previewing a June 30 open-source release for Ernie 4.5 series.
Introducing ERNIE X1 Turbo & ERNIE 4.5 Turbo!
— Baidu Inc. (@Baidu_Inc) April 25, 2025
Building on the success of ERNIE X1 and 4.5, the upgraded ERNIE X1 Turbo and 4.5 Turbo deliver results faster and cheaper. Both models stand out for their multimodal capabilities, strong reasoning and low costs.
For X1 Turbo, input… pic.twitter.com/UzYMtDFGUC
Developer Community Feedback
Early adopters report impressive gains. Alvin Foo, venture partner at Zero2Launch, shared on X (formerly Twitter) that after “playing around with Ernie 4.5 Turbo for hours, its performance remains consistently impressive,” especially in complex reasoning tasks.
Conclusion of Ernie 4.5 Turbo
Ernie 4.5 Turbo marks a significant leap in Baidu’s AI roadmap, balancing top-tier performance with industry-leading affordability. By integrating powerful multimodal capabilities and making the model open source, Baidu is poised to democratize advanced AI—fueling innovation across sectors from finance to education. As these models roll out to a broader developer base, watch for a new wave of applications that harness Ernie 4.5 Turbo’s speed, cost efficiency, and multimodal versatility.