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ERNIE
Baidu's ERNIE family — Chinese-language and multimodal models, with older generations released as open weights.
Model Facts
Latest model: ERNIE 5.1
- Provider
- Baidu
- Released
- May 9, 2026
- Context window
- 128K tokens
- Weights
- Closed
Full Model List
| Model | Released | Status | Context | Modalities | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ERNIE 5.1 | May 9, 2026 | current | 128K tokens | – | sparse MoE, closed weights, 128K context |
| ERNIE 5.0 | Jan 22, 2026 | legacy | – | Text, image, audio, video | native multimodal model (text, image, audio, video), proprietary license |
| ERNIE 4.5 | Mar 1, 2025 | legacy | – | – | open-sourced under Apache 2.0 in 10 variants (up to 424B total parameters); month approximate |
- Official model page:
- ernie.baidu.com
- Official documentation:
- cloud.baidu.com/doc/qianfan
- Other sources:
- ERNIE releases (LLM Reference)
- ERNIE 5.0 (LLM Stats)
What it is
ERNIE is Baidu's model family. ERNIE 5.1 (May 9, 2026) is a sparse mixture-of-experts model with a 128K context window and — unlike the open ERNIE 4.5 series — unpublished weights. ERNIE 5.0 (January 22, 2026) is a natively multimodal model covering text, image, audio and video. The ERNIE 4.5 family remains available as open weights under Apache 2.0.
Where this information comes from
Details come from model trackers and Baidu coverage. Release dates, context windows and benchmark scores are vendor-reported unless stated, and harnesses differ between labs, so treat the numbers as indicative.
Notable traits
- Strong Chinese-language performance.
- Natively multimodal from ERNIE 5.0.
- Flagship weights are closed; ERNIE 4.5 is open.