Baidu releases ERNIE 5.1 with reduced pretraining cost and parameter scale

Baidu's PaddlePaddle account announced ERNIE 5.1, which it says cuts total parameters to about one-third and activated parameters to about one-half, using roughly 6% of the pretraining cost of models at similar scale.

The post reports benchmark results including 99.6 on AIME26 with tools, surpassing DeepSeek-V4-Pro on τ3-bench and SpreadsheetBench-Verified, and ranking #4 globally on Arena Search.

ERNIE 5.1 is available through the ERNIE website and Baidu AI Studio Model Playground.