Chinese internet search giant Baidu will make its advanced AI chatbot services free, as competition heats up among global developers following the surging popularity of startup DeepSeek’s models. Ernie Bot,

Baidu Q4 beats top-line and bottom-line estimates. Southwest expands cost-cutting by announcing 15% reduction in corporate overhead workforce. OpenAI said to mull special voting rights.

Chinese tech firm Baidu is heating up the country’s AI price war by promising to offer access to ERNIE Bot, its AI chatbot, for free. Starting April 1, ERNIE Bot, the company’s chatbot first released just a few months after OpenAI’s ChatGPT,

Chinese internet search giant Baidu will make its advanced AI chatbot services free, as competition heats up among global developers following the surging popularity of startup DeepSeek’s models.

Baidu and OpenAI announced premium models at no cost over the next few months after DeepSeek’s generative AI caused a lot of buzz.

Chinese internet search giant Baidu will make its advanced AI chatbot services free, as competition heats up among global developers following the surging popularity of startup DeepSeek’s models.

Baidu, China’s largest internet search company, announced that it will offer its AI chatbot Ernie Bot for free starting April 1, as competition in the AI sector heats up. The AI service will be accessible at no cost to all users on both desktop and mobile platforms,

Baidu made its AI model Ernie 4.5 open source, inspired by DeepSeek's success.CEO Robin Li previously said closed-source models were more powerful and economical.Baidu's shares surged last week after announcing its AI chatbot will be free from April 1.

Baidu plans to release the next generation of its model for powering generative AI applications in the second half of this year, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The company, the operator of China’s most popular search engine, announced the plan today. Reuters reported that the initiative centers on an upcoming family of Ernie models dubbed the Ernie 4.5 series. Baidu will start rolling out the LLM series to users in the coming months and plans to open-source its code on June 30.

The Hong Kong shares of Baidu plunged on Monday, wiping $2.4 billion off its market value, after the founder of the Chinese search engine giant was not spotted at a rare meeting between President Xi Jinping and corporate leaders.

Investment in data centres and cloud infrastructure is still needed despite DeepSeek challenging the cost efficiency of large AI models, Baidu CEO Robin Li said on Tuesday.