Baidu Unveils Reasoning Model ERNIE X1.1 with Upgrades in Key Capabilities

Rhea-AI Summary

Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) has unveiled significant AI advancements at WAVE SUMMIT 2025, headlined by its new reasoning model ERNIE X1.1. The model demonstrates substantial improvements with 34.8% better factuality, 12.5% enhanced instruction following, and 9.6% improved agentic capabilities compared to its predecessor.

The company announced three major developments: the release of PaddlePaddle framework v3.2 with improved model training efficiency, the launch of Baidu Comate 3.5S AI coding assistant, and the open-sourcing of the ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-Thinking model. The PaddlePaddle-ERNIE ecosystem now serves 23.33 million developers and 760,000 enterprises, while Baidu Comate supports over 10 million developers.

Positive

• ERNIE X1.1 achieves performance on par with top-tier models like GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro
• PaddlePaddle-ERNIE ecosystem reaches 23.33M developers and 760,000 enterprises
• 45% of Baidu's new code is now AI-generated, demonstrating significant productivity gains
• Baidu Comate has supported over 10M developers, showing strong market adoption

Negative

• None.

Insights

AI Technology Analyst

Baidu's ERNIE X1.1 demonstrates significant AI capability improvements, positioning the company competitively against industry leaders in the foundation model space.

Baidu's new ERNIE X1.1 represents a significant technological advancement in the competitive AI foundation model landscape. The model shows impressive improvements in critical areas: 34.8% better factuality, 12.5% improved instruction following, and 9.6% enhanced agentic capabilities compared to its predecessor. These improvements aren't merely incremental—they're substantial enough to position ERNIE X1.1 ahead of models like DeepSeek R1-0528 and on par with industry leaders GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro in overall performance.

The technical approach behind ERNIE X1.1 is particularly noteworthy. Built on their multimodal ERNIE 4.5 foundation, Baidu has implemented an iterative hybrid reinforcement learning framework combining mixed reinforcement learning with iterative self-distillation. This sophisticated training methodology likely contributes to the performance gains across key capabilities.

Baidu's complementary ecosystem developments further strengthen their AI platform strategy. The updated PaddlePaddle framework v3.2 delivers impressive efficiency gains, achieving 47% pre-training MFU (Model FLOPs Utilization) on their largest models. This addresses critical challenges in large-scale model training that typically limit AI development. Meanwhile, their developer ecosystem has reached significant scale, serving 23.33 million developers and 760,000 enterprises.

The open-sourcing of ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-Thinking model reflects an intelligent strategic balance between proprietary and open technologies. As a lightweight MoE (Mixture of Experts) model with 21 billion total parameters but only 3 billion active parameters, it demonstrates Baidu's technical capability to deliver near state-of-the-art performance with significantly reduced computational requirements—a key differentiator in practical AI deployment.

• ERNIE X1.1 shows major advancements in factuality, instruction following, and agentic capabilities; it surpasses DeepSeek R1-0528 in overall performance while performing on par with top-tier models like GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro.
• The PaddlePaddle-ERNIE ecosystem now serves 23.33 million developers and 760,000 enterprises; while the AI coding assistant Baidu Comate has supported more than 10 million developers.
• Baidu also announced the open-source of ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-Thinking model.

BEIJING, Sept. 9, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- At WAVE SUMMIT 2025, the company's deep learning developer conference, Baidu unveiled a series of AI advancements that further accelerate the wide adoption of AI. These advancements include the company's latest reasoning model ERNIE X 1.1, an upgrade to the PaddlePaddle framework, the upgraded AI coding assistant Baidu Comate 3.5S, as well as the open-sourcing of the ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-Thinking model.

ERNIE X1.1 Shows Major Advancement in Factuality, Instruction Following, and Agentic Capabilities

The newly released ERNIE X1.1 reasoning model is a significant upgrade that delivers major advancements across core capabilities including factuality, instruction following, and agentic capabilities. Compared to ERNIE X1, ERNIE X1.1's factuality is up 34.8%, instruction following is up 12.5%, and agentic capabilities are up 9.6%

Multiple benchmark results show that ERNIE X1.1's overall performance surpassed that of DeepSeek R1-0528, demonstrating clear advantages in certain tasks. Meanwhile, its performance is on par with other top-tier models such as GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro. Built upon ERNIE 4.5, a multimodal foundation model, ERNIE X1.1 has incorporated an iterative hybrid reinforcement learning framework that blends mixed reinforcement learning and iterative self-distillation.

ERNIE X1.1 is now accessible to users via the ERNIE Bot website (ernie.baidu.com) and the Wenxiaoyan app, and has also been deployed on Qianfan, Baidu AI Cloud's MaaS (Models-as-a-Service) platform — open to enterprise clients and developers.

PaddlePaddle Framework v3.2 and Baidu Comate 3.5S Lower Barriers for AI Development and Deployment

At the event, Baidu also debuted the PaddlePaddle framework version 3.2, featuring enhancements in model training, hardware compatibility, and ecosystem support. The upgraded PaddlePaddle framework incorporates three core upgrades—computational optimization, parallel strategies, and native fault tolerance—that address long-standing challenges in model training. The framework significantly boosts efficiency, achieving a pre-training MFU of 47% on the ERNIE-4.5-300B-A47B model.

Accompanying the new framework are a suite of toolkits, including ERNIEKit, designed for foundation model development, FastDeploy v2.2 for efficient model deployment, and two scientific computing toolkits, PaddleCFD and PaddleMaterials. Together, these releases further reduce barriers to applying foundation models across training and deployment.

To date, the PaddlePaddle-ERNIE ecosystem has served 23.33 million developers and 760,000 enterprises.

Also released at the event was Baidu Comate 3.5S (Super Synergistic AgentS), a major upgrade to its AI coding assistant. The new version strengthens multi-agent-collaboration capabilities, enabling a single developer to achieve the productivity and efficiency of an entire team.

Baidu Comate 3.5S delivers three core enhancements. First, agents are more powerful, with stronger business understanding, the ability to break down task lists, and improved execution accuracy. Second, the system advances from single-agent to multi-agent collaboration, dynamically generating multiple agents that autonomously work together to complete complex tasks. Third, team collaboration is reinforced through the integration of Rules and MCP, creating a unified knowledge base that enables seamless knowledge transfer within teams.

To date, Baidu Comate has already supported more than 10 million developers. Within Baidu, 45% of new code is now generated by AI.

Open-sourced ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-Thinking Model Delivers Outstanding Performance Across Tasks

At the conference, Baidu announced the open-sourcing of ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-Thinking, a deep-thinking model trained on the foundation of ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B. It supports a 128K context window and is designed for complex reasoning tasks that require long-context understanding. The model delivers outstanding performance across a wide range of tasks, including content creation, logical reasoning, mathematical computation, code generation, and tool use.

As a lightweight MoE model with 21 billion total parameters and only 3 billion active parameters, ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-Thinking has achieved performance close to leading large-scale models across benchmarks, delivering near-SOTA intelligence at a significantly reduced scale.

ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-Thinking is now available on platforms including Hugging Face and Baidu AI Studio. The release of this model follows the open-sourcing of 10 other distinct ERNIE 4.5 models on June 30.

About Baidu

Founded in 2000, Baidu's mission is to make the complicated world simpler through technology. Baidu is a leading AI company with strong internet foundation, trading on the NASDAQ under "BIDU" and HKEX under "9888." One Baidu ADS represents eight Class A ordinary shares.

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SOURCE Baidu, Inc.

FAQ

What are the key improvements in Baidu's ERNIE X1.1 model compared to its predecessor?

ERNIE X1.1 shows 34.8% improvement in factuality, 12.5% better instruction following, and 9.6% enhanced agentic capabilities compared to ERNIE X1.

How does ERNIE X1.1 compare to other leading AI models?

ERNIE X1.1 surpasses DeepSeek R1-0528 in overall performance and performs on par with top-tier models like GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro.

What is the reach of Baidu's PaddlePaddle-ERNIE ecosystem in 2025?

The ecosystem serves 23.33 million developers and 760,000 enterprises, with Baidu Comate supporting over 10 million developers.

What are the key features of Baidu Comate 3.5S?

Baidu Comate 3.5S features enhanced multi-agent-collaboration, stronger business understanding, improved task breakdown capabilities, and better execution accuracy through Rules and MCP integration.

What are the specifications of the open-sourced ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-Thinking model?

It's a lightweight MoE model with 21B total parameters, 3B active parameters, and supports a 128K context window, delivering near-SOTA performance for complex reasoning tasks.