China's Baidu Launches Two New AI Models as Industry Competition Heats Up

People walk past a Baidu logo outside the company headquarters in Beijing on February 2, 2024. (AFP)
People walk past a Baidu logo outside the company headquarters in Beijing on February 2, 2024. (AFP)
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China's Baidu Launches Two New AI Models as Industry Competition Heats Up

People walk past a Baidu logo outside the company headquarters in Beijing on February 2, 2024. (AFP)
People walk past a Baidu logo outside the company headquarters in Beijing on February 2, 2024. (AFP)

China's Baidu said on Sunday it has launched two new artificial intelligence models, including a new reasoning-focused model that it said rivalled DeepSeek's model, as it vies to stand out in a fiercely competitive AI race.

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek's roll-out of AI models which it says is on par with, or even better than, industry-leading models in the United States at a fraction of the cost, has roiled the industry and re-energized the global AI race.

"ERNIE X1 delivers performance on par with DeepSeek R1 at only half the price," Baidu said of one of the new models.

The X1 has "stronger understanding, planning, reflection, and evolution capabilities," Baidu said, adding that it is the first deep thinking model that uses tools autonomously.

Baidu said its latest foundation model ERNIE 4.5 has "excellent multimodal understanding ability. It has more advanced language ability, and its understanding, generation, logic, and memory abilities are comprehensively improved."

It also has "high EQ", and it is easy to understand network memes and satirical cartoons, Baidu said.

One of China's earliest tech giants to launch a ChatGPT-style chatbot, Baidu has struggled to gain widespread adoption for its Ernie large language model, despite claiming performance comparable to OpenAI's GPT-4, amid fierce competition.

Multimodal AI systems are capable of processing and integrating various types of data including text, video, images and audio, and can convert content across these formats.



Google Will Pay Texas $1.4 Billion to Settle Claims the Company Collected Users’ Data without Permission

A Google logo is seen at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California, US, November 1, 2018. (Reuters)
A Google logo is seen at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California, US, November 1, 2018. (Reuters)
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Google Will Pay Texas $1.4 Billion to Settle Claims the Company Collected Users’ Data without Permission

A Google logo is seen at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California, US, November 1, 2018. (Reuters)
A Google logo is seen at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California, US, November 1, 2018. (Reuters)

Google will pay $1.4 billion to Texas to settle claims the company collected users' data without permission, the state’s attorney general announced Friday.

Attorney General Ken Paxton described the settlement as sending a message to tech companies that he will not allow them to make money off of “selling away our rights and freedoms.”

“In Texas, Big Tech is not above the law,” Paxton said in a statement. “For years, Google secretly tracked people’s movements, private searches, and even their voiceprints and facial geometry through their products and services. I fought back and won.”

The agreement settles several claims Texas made against the search giant in 2022 related to geolocation, incognito searches and biometric data. The state argued Google was “unlawfully tracking and collecting users’ private data.”

Paxton claimed, for example, that Google collected millions of biometric identifiers, including voiceprints and records of face geometry, through such products and services as Google Photos and Google Assistant.

Google spokesperson José Castañeda said the agreement settles an array of “old claims,” some of which relate to product policies the company has already changed.

“We are pleased to put them behind us, and we will continue to build robust privacy controls into our services,” he said in a statement.

The company also clarified that the settlement does not require any new product changes.

Paxton said the $1.4 billion is the largest amount won by any state in a settlement with Google over this type of data-privacy violations.

Texas previously reached two other key settlements with Google within the last two years, including one in December 2023 in which the company agreed to pay $700 million and make several other concessions to settle allegations that it had been stifling competition against its Android app store.

Meta has also agreed to a $1.4 billion settlement with Texas in a privacy lawsuit over allegations that the tech giant used users' biometric data without their permission.