This post was originally published by [email protected] (Michael Nuñez) on Venture Beat.
Baidu Inc., China’s largest search engine company, released a new artificial intelligence model on Monday that its developers claim outperforms competitors from Google and OpenAI on several vision-related benchmarks despite using a fraction of the computing resources typically required for such systems.
The model, dubbed ERNIE-4.5-VL-28B-A3B-Thinking, is the latest salvo in an escalating competition among technology companies to build AI systems that can understand and reason about images, videos, and documents alongside traditional text — capabilities increasingly critical for enterprise applications ranging from automated document processing to industrial quality control.
What sets Baidu’s release apart is its efficiency: the model activates just