Baidu, one of China's largest tech companies, has launched an AI model that they themselves claim is both better and cheaper than the competitor Deepseek, which in turn gave the entire AI market a scare when it was launched at the beginning of the year.
The X1 model from Baidu is said to be on par with the Deepseek competitor but more cost-effective. Baidu's "chatbot", Ernie 4.5, is claimed to be stronger than the American Open AI's 4.5 model of Chat GPT.
Baidu was one of the first Chinese companies to venture into the AI market, but the competition is intense both domestically and globally. Chinese Bytedance, which owns Tiktok, is one of the contenders, just like gaming giant Tencent and e-commerce dragon Alibaba.
