ERNIE 4.5

ERNIE 4.5 is a multimodal foundation model developed by Baidu, announced on 16 March 2025 alongside the ERNIE X1 reasoning model. It belongs to the ERNIE family (Chinese 文心, Wenxin) that powers the Ernie Bot assistant.

The model is built on a heterogeneous multimodal mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture that shares parameters across modalities while also allocating dedicated parameters for each. The language (LLM) versions handle text, while the vision-language (VL) versions additionally support image and video; the context window is 128K tokens.

Baidu released the ERNIE 4.5 family as open source under the Apache 2.0 license, publishing weights and inference code on Hugging Face and AI Studio. The open variants include the ERNIE-4.5-300B-A47B language model (300B total / 47B activated), 21B-A3B (21B / 3B) and a dense 0.3B, as well as the vision-language models ERNIE-4.5-VL-424B-A47B (424B total / 47B activated) and VL-28B-A3B.

In April 2025, at the Baidu Create 2025 conference, an optimized ERNIE 4.5 Turbo variant (faster responses, lower cost) was also released. The models are available through the Ernie Bot assistant (yiyan.baidu.com, offered free of charge), the Baidu AI Cloud (Qianfan) platform, and locally thanks to the open weights.