Chinese AI defeats GPT-5.

Baidu claims its AI is better than ChatGPT and Gemini. Photo: Baidu .

At the Baidu World 2025 event, the Chinese giant Baidu announced its next-generation platform model, along with a series of AI product upgrades and international expansion plans. Accordingly, ERNIE 5.0 is a proprietary model capable of processing and creating content across multiple formats such as text, images, audio, and video .

The company's goal is to become a global competitor in the increasingly competitive AI market. ERNIE 5.0 launched just hours after OpenAI upgraded its core platform model from GPT-5 to GPT-5.1, promising reduced token consumption and improved interaction experiences with more human-centric options.

ERNIE-4.5-VL-28B-A3B-Thinking, a recently released open-source model under the enterprise-friendly Apache 2.0 license, allows users to access the new chatbot only through Baidu's ERNIE Bot website and the Qianfan cloud platform API for institutional clients.

A variant of the model is ERNIE 5.0 Preview 1022, optimized for text-intensive tasks, alongside a general preview version capable of balancing various data types. Additionally, Baidu introduced a series of significant upgrades to its "digital human" platform, including no-code tools and versatile AI agents.

ERNIE 5.0 marks a shift in how artificial intelligence is deployed on a large scale, aiming to expand the AI footprint beyond the Chinese market. “The localization of AI will become an inherent capability, transforming artificial intelligence from an expense into a productivity asset,” said CEO Robin Li.

ERNIE 5.0 demonstrates superior capabilities in understanding graphs and documents. Image: Baidu.

Test results show that ERNIE 5.0 has achieved near-to-on-the-top performance on leading Western platform models across a diverse range of tasks. ERNIE 5.0 Preview outperforms or matches OpenAI's GPT-5-High and Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro in tests of multimodal reasoning, document comprehension, and image-based question answering.

At the same time, the model demonstrates strong capabilities in language and code execution. The company emphasizes the ability to handle combined multimodal input-output within the same model, rather than concatenating post-processing data modes, which the team considers a key differentiating factor.

In terms of image processing, ERNIE 5.0 achieved top scores on OCRBench, DocVQA, and ChartQA—three benchmarks that assess document recognition, content comprehension, and reasoning with structured data. Baidu stated that the model surpassed both GPT-5-High and Gemini 2.5 Pro in document and chart-related tests.

In terms of image creation, ERNIE 5.0 achieved results equal to or surpass Google Veo3 in categories such as semantic match and image quality, according to Baidu's internal assessment. The model's multimodal integration capabilities enable the creation and interpretation of visual content with a high degree of contextual understanding.

ERNIE 5.0 is positioned at a cost and segment comparable to other high-end models from Chinese competitors like Alibaba. It is more expensive than its predecessor, the ERNIE 4.5 Turbo. However, compared to models from the US, the chatbot's price is still in the mid-range.

According to Venturebeat, this shows Baidu's strategy to clearly differentiate between low-cost models serving high traffic and high-capacity models for complex tasks and multimodal reasoning.