ERNIE X1

ERNIE X1 is a reasoning (“deep thinking”) model developed by Baidu, announced on 16 March 2025 alongside the general-purpose ERNIE 4.5 model. It is a specialized model focused on complex reasoning and is part of the ERNIE family (Chinese 文心, Wenxin) that powers the Ernie Bot assistant.

Its performance improvements were achieved through new technologies, including “FlashMask” dynamic attention masking and a heterogeneous multimodal mixture-of-experts architecture. Thanks to the multimodal architecture, the model can process different data types as part of its reasoning process.

In April 2025, Baidu released Turbo variants — ERNIE 4.5 Turbo and ERNIE X1 Turbo — optimized for faster responses and lower operational costs.

The model is available through the Ernie Bot assistant (yiyan.baidu.com), which Baidu made free of charge, and through Baidu’s cloud platform (Qianfan). ERNIE X1 is a proprietary model — its weights have not been released (unlike some later ERNIE models).