Baidu's Ernie 5.1 cuts 94 percent of pre-training costs while competing with top models

Baidu released Ernie 5.1, a newer model built from Ernie 5.0 with fewer parameters and lower active compute.

The company says pre-training costs were cut to about 6% of comparable models, highlighting major efficiency gains.

Ernie 5.1 scored strongly on search, agent, reasoning, and creative benchmarks, including top placement among Chinese models on the Arena Search Leaderboard.

Baidu also said the model is competitive with systems like DeepSeek-V4-Pro and Gemini 3.1 Pro on several public tests.