ERNIE 5.0
Baidu's proprietary natively omni-modal flagship — 2.4T parameters, first Chinese model in the LMArena global top 10.
About
ERNIE 5.0 is Baidu's next-generation foundation model, unveiled at Baidu World 2025 on November 13, 2025. Unlike its open-source predecessor ERNIE-4.5-VL-28B-A3B-Thinking (Apache 2.0), 5.0 is proprietary and natively omni-modal: a unified auto-regressive architecture that jointly models text, images, audio, and video from the start of training, built on Baidu's PaddlePaddle framework.
Baidu reports 2.4 trillion parameters with less than 3% activated per inference. It became the first Chinese model to crack the LMArena global top 10 — #8 on the text leaderboard (1460), #2 globally on math behind only GPT-5.2 (High), with the 5.0-Preview vision build at #8 on the vision board. All of these are Baidu-reported figures; independent researchers (e.g. Info-Tech) have cautioned the outperformance claims need broad independent validation, and early developers flagged rough edges such as tool-call loops in agentic workflows. Access is via the ERNIE Bot site and the Qianfan cloud platform API for enterprise customers.
Specs
Context window
Pricing
Free quota
API access
Weights
Released
Benchmarks
Provider-reported (Baidu): LMArena text #8 (score 1460), math #2 globally, 5.0-Preview vision #8; first Chinese model in the LMArena global top 10.
Independent: no third-party reproduction of the ranking claims found; Info-Tech Research flagged the figures as needing broader validation.
Provider-reported unless a source says otherwise. Benchmarks are marketing-adjacent by nature — treat them as directional.
Use cases
Trust score — 7/10
Release confirmed by Baidu's official PR (Nov 13, 2025) plus independent press (VentureBeat, InfoWorld) with consistent specs. Docked for: (1) every headline benchmark figure is Baidu-reported with no independent reproduction; (2) proprietary with no weights; (3) early production-reliability concerns reported by developers (tool-call loops, agentic rough edges).