Chinese tech firm Baidu to make its AI LLM Ernie open-source

ISTANBUL

Chinese tech firm Baidu announced on Monday that it will make its artificial intelligence (AI) large language model (LLM), known as Ernie, open source amid global competition in the field, Global Times reported.

Baidu told Global Times that by making Ernie completely open-source, the company hopes to make its AI model more accessible for researchers and developers, to achieve a more collaborative open-source AI ecosystem.

Users with open-source access will be able to inspect and modify Ernie's underlying code and parameters, allowing for model customization and development.

Baidu is one of several technology companies that have decided to invest heavily in the AI sector following China's DeepSeek launch. This surge has resulted in the development of many high-quality open-source models.

Alibaba Cloud's Qwen2.5-Max has outperformed expectations, accumulating over 200 million downloads worldwide and inspiring over 100,000 derivative models, surpassing Meta's Llama as the world's largest open-source model group.

In recent years, China has made notable progress in open-source LLMs, with many AI systems steadily closing the gap on global leaders in both functionality and performance.