Baidu has unveiled Ernie 5.0, describing it as a new multimodal artificial intelligence model, as the company’s AI-powered Ernie assistant reached 200 million monthly active users. The announcement highlights how quickly Chinese tech firms are rolling out bigger models and adding new features to their AI assistants.
Ernie 5.0 is described as Baidu’s most advanced AI model to date, and the company said it can process text, images, audio, and video. Baidu’s Ernie assistant is integrated into Baidu’s search engine on PCs and in the Baidu search engine app, according to a separate report.
What Baidu says is new in Ernie 5.0
Baidu said Ernie 5.0 has 2.4 trillion parameters and is built as an “omni-modal foundation model” that can handle multiple formats beyond text. The company also described the model as using an ultra-large mixture-of-experts architecture with “highly sparse activation,” saying it uses less than 3% of its parameters per inference to improve efficiency without sacrificing performance.
Baidu first previewed the model in November, and the company said it has since climbed rankings. A report said that a leaderboard published by LMArena last week showed “Ernie-5.0-0110” ranked first among Chinese models and eighth globally in text performance, ahead of OpenAI’s GPT-5.1-High and Google’s Gemini-2.5-Pro.
The 200 million-user milestone
Baidu’s Ernie assistant reached 200 million monthly active users, marking a major usage milestone for the product. The AI assistant is positioned as a general-purpose tool that can answer questions, find flights, and order food, and it can also generate images and write summaries.
The same report said users can switch between different AI models, including DeepSeek and Ernie, and noted that the assistant is linked to other Baidu platforms such as Baidu Maps and Baidu Health. It also stated that Baidu released Ernie Bot in 2023 and described the company as the first Chinese company to launch an AI chatbot.
Rival assistants push deeper into daily tasks
Baidu’s growth comes as it faces competition from other major Chinese companies, including Alibaba and ByteDance. One report said Alibaba’s AI app has reached 100 million monthly active users after a public beta launch in November 2025.
A separate industry-focused article described a broader “agentic commerce” push in China, saying assistants are moving from chat into actions like buying, booking, and paying. That article said Alibaba’s Qwen assistant gained end-to-end ordering features in January and that the upgrade integrated Taobao, Fliggy, Alipay, and Amap so a single request can trigger multi-app fulfilment.
The same piece quoted Wu Jia saying, “AI is evolving from intelligence to agency,” and it contrasted Alibaba’s approach with ByteDance positioning Doubao as a system-level aide that can move between phone apps. It also described early demos that compared flight prices, found restaurants, and completed payments on a ZTE prototype, while noting that WeChat authentication prompts interrupted some automated flows.
Chips, self-reliance, and the global AI gap debate
Baidu’s AI push is also tied to its chip business, with a report saying that Kunlunxin Technology—Baidu’s chip subsidiary—confidentially filed for a Hong Kong initial public offering earlier this month. The report linked the filing to Beijing’s push for technological self-reliance, especially in sectors such as semiconductors.
The same report also cited a comment from Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, saying China’s AI models might be “six months behind” the capabilities of their US counterparts. Together, these developments show how product launches, user growth, and hardware ambitions are intersecting as Chinese companies race to scale their AI ecosystems.
