China's Baidu said on Sunday it has launched two new artificial intelligence models, the multimodal ERNIE 4.5 and a new reasoning-focused model called X1, as it vies to stand out in a fiercely competitive AI race.

Chinese internet search giant Baidu released a new artificial intelligence reasoning model Sunday and made its AI chatbot services free to consumers as ferocious competition grips the sector.

Tech giant says reasoning model Ernie X1 ‘delivers performance on par with DeepSeek R1 at only half the price’.