Baidu from China has open-sourced the Ernie 4.5 AI model this week. The tech company had earlier announced its plans to let the community explore its large language models (LLMs) and now is making it happen. Baidu has offered 10 variants of the Ernie 4.5 AI model and released new tool kits for these variants. The company has offered a variety of abilities like reasoning and thinking among others with these models. 

Ernie 4.5 AI Model Now Open-Sourced: What It Means 

Baidu making its Ernie 4.5 AI model open-source means developers can access the source codes of these models and download them from Baidu’s Hugging Face listing or head over to GitHub to gather the details. They can be inspected, scrutinised, especially for how the data is processed or analysed using these AI models. 

Baidu claims these AI models have a total of 47 billion parameters, and more importantly, three billion of these are active at the same time. Making it open-source also means Baidu has to share the details of its training methods for these AI models, which allows more developers to implement a similar structure for other models. 

Open-Source The Way To Grow

Chinese giants like Baidu making their models available to the community shows the right path to follow for others. Companies can be wary of the possible consequences of letting their rivals access their tools but the AI industry currently needs to co-exist and chart a trajectory that lets the technology evolve in the right and safe manner.

DeepSeek is the other AI model to spring out of China in recent times, and the R1 model was recently upgraded to R2 which is claimed to be faster and cheaper than developing ChatGPT models. In fact, DeepSeek was recently given a jolt in Europe, where the AI chatbot is facing data protection concerns in countries like Germany.

The AI app competing with ChatGPT and Gemini AI has been allegedly sending user data back to servers in China which has got the authorities in many parts of the world worried about the privacy of their users.

Germany is the latest from the European contingent to spark these concerns and ordered the tech giant to take them off their App Store and Play Store, respectively.