Baidu Inc. released a new artificial intelligence model that articulates its reasoning, in an apparent bid to regain momentum against up-and-coming rivals like DeepSeek.The Ernie X1 model by China’s internet search leader works similarly to DeepSeek R1 — which shocked Silicon Valley by offering comparable performance to the world’s best chatbots at a fraction of their development cost.

DeepSeek has emerged as the new standard for AI model makers to beat after launching R1 just before Christmas. As a reasoning model, R1 stood out for matching the capabilities of the best U.S.-made AI models, despite its maker only spending a small fraction of the cost its rivals had spent in training it.

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. Baidu faces stiff competition in the consumer-facing AI sector where startup DeepSeek shook up the industry at home and abroad with a model that performed comparably to competitors such as US-made ChatGPT,