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Baidu announced ERNIE 5.1 on May 9, 2026, positioning it as a more parameter-efficient successor built on ERNIE 5.0. The company highlights reasoning, agentic tasks, deep search, knowledge, and creative writing. Its performance and efficiency figures are Baidu’s own reported claims, not independent findings.
What is ERNIE 5.1?
ERNIE 5.1 is Baidu’s latest model in the ERNIE family. Baidu says it inherits the pre-training foundation of ERNIE 5.0, which the company announced at Baidu World on November 13, 2025. The earlier model was described as natively omni-modal, jointly modeling text, images, audio, and video; that description of ERNIE 5.0 should not be taken as a specification for every ERNIE 5.1 access route.
Baidu presents 5.1 as a model for agentic work and reasoning, as well as deep search, world knowledge, creative writing, and tool use. It also reports that 5.1 has about one-third the total parameters and half the active parameters of ERNIE 5.0, and uses about 6% of the pre-training cost of comparable models. These are vendor-reported comparisons, and the announcement does not provide an independent evaluation or enough methodology to treat them as like-for-like measurements.
What’s new in Baidu’s ERNIE AI?
The central change in Baidu’s announcement is efficiency: the company says ERNIE 5.1 retains the 5.0 foundation while reducing model size and pre-training cost. Baidu also emphasizes stronger performance across practical tasks, including search and tool-assisted reasoning.
Reported benchmark results
- Arena Search: Baidu reports a score of 1,223 and fourth place globally as of May 9, 2026.
- AIME26: Baidu reports a score of 99.6 with tool use.
Both results come from Baidu’s announcement. They should be read as dated vendor claims, not as independent validation or proof that ERNIE 5.1 will outperform alternatives on a particular user’s tasks.
Creative production integrations
Baidu says ERNIE 5.1 was being rolled out progressively to more than ten creative-production agent platforms, including ISEKAI ZERO, Mulan AI, Diting Huanliu, and Storymaster. This does not establish availability in every country or on every named platform at all times.
How can I try ERNIE 5.1?
Baidu’s announcement points to the ERNIE website and an ERNIE 5.1 playground on Baidu AI Studio. For developers, Baidu AI Cloud’s Qianfan model catalog, updated September 7, 2026, lists an ERNIE 5.1 text-generation API endpoint.
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Consumer chatbot
Use the ERNIE website to check current chatbot access and availability in your location. Baidu’s cited announcement identifies this as an access route, but does not give region-by-region availability details.
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Hosted API
The Qianfan catalog lists ERNIE 5.1 with a 128k-token context, a maximum input of 119k tokens, and default limits of 60 requests per minute and 150,000 tokens per minute. These are cataloged service values, updated September 7, 2026; account conditions or later platform changes may affect what an individual developer can use. The catalog is a model listing, not a price schedule.
Local deployment and licensing
The cited ERNIE 5.1 announcement and API catalog do not establish that 5.1 is open-weight, available for local deployment, or licensed under Apache 2.0. Those terms should not be inferred from ERNIE 4.5: Baidu separately announced that earlier family in June 2025, describing ten variants and public access under Apache 2.0.
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Is ERNIE 5.1 free?
Baidu says ERNIE Bot became free for PC and mobile users starting April 1, 2025. That consumer-access statement does not establish that ERNIE 5.1 API usage through Qianfan is free. Check the current terms for the specific service before building around it; the cited Qianfan catalog does not state API pricing.
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