ERNIE 4.5 Turbo
Baidu's speed-and-price-optimized multimodal flagship — frontier-class at a fraction of Western pricing.
About
ERNIE 4.5 Turbo is Baidu's cost-optimized multimodal flagship, released April 2025. It handles text, images, audio, and video natively with a 128K-token context, and Baidu positions it against GPT-4.1-class multimodal work at roughly 40% of DeepSeek V3's cost — the company claims it beats GPT-4.5 on benchmarks at 1% of GPT-4.5's price (provider-claimed, treat accordingly). The ERNIE 4.5 base-model weights were open-sourced under Apache 2.0 in June 2025; Turbo is the hosted, price-optimized serving tier.
On Baidu's Qianfan platform it lists at about $0.55 input / $2.20 output per million tokens — an order of magnitude under Western frontier pricing. The ERNIE Bot consumer chatbot is free for registered users, and the model is deeply integrated across Baidu Search and the Wenxiaoyan app.
Specs
Context window
Pricing
Free quota
API access
Weights
Released
Benchmarks
Provider-reported: beats GPT-4.5 across benchmarks at 1% of the price.
Independent: no third-party reproduction found — treat all figures as provider-claimed.
Provider-reported unless a source says otherwise. Benchmarks are marketing-adjacent by nature — treat them as directional.
Use cases
Trust score — 7/10
Official Qianfan product page verified live (HTTP 200); Apache 2.0 base weights independently downloadable on Hugging Face. Docked for: (1) all capability-vs-GPT-4.5 claims are provider-run; (2) the Turbo tier itself is API-only, so the open-weights story applies to the base family, not this exact variant; (3) international onboarding is friction-heavy.