Baidu, one of China’s artificial intelligence champions, on Tuesday released an updated version of its proprietary reasoning model with comparable performance to advanced AI systems from DeepSeek, OpenAI and Google.
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Citing data from third-party AI benchmarks, Baidu chief technology officer Wang Haifeng said at a developer conference in Beijing that the firm’s X1.1 reasoning model had surpassed the performance of DeepSeek-R1, while it matched OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro.
“From reasoning improvements to slow, deep thinking and multimodal abilities, [our] model’s performance and efficiency have increased,” Wang said.
The X1.1 model showed a 34.8 per cent improvement in knowledge accuracy, as well as enhanced agentic capabilities and instruction compliance, according to Wang. He attributed that development to a “mixed reinforcement learning” process.
The closed-source X1.1 model is now available to corporate clients via Baidu’s cloud computing platform. Individual users can access the model through Baidu’s Ernie Bot website and app.
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Baidu’s product update reflects heightened competition in China’s AI market, where start-up DeepSeek and Alibaba Cloud have made major strides in open-source models. Alibaba Cloud is the AI and cloud computing services arm of Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the South China Morning Post.
