ThursdAI — the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — has covered 6 Baidu releases since Mar 2025, most recently ERNIE 5.1 Preview on Apr 30, 2026. Highlights include ERNIE 4.5, MuseStreamer, ERNIE-Image, ERNIE 5.1 Preview. 3 of them shipped with open weights. Every entry below has the episode segment where we covered it live, plus primary-source links and key numbers where we have them.
Baidu ERNIE 5.1 Preview hits #13 on Arena with 6% of the compute
Baidu's ERNIE 5.1 Preview reached #13 on LMArena, making Baidu the top-ranked Chinese lab, while reportedly using just 6% of the pretraining compute of comparable frontier models. The model is available at ernie.baidu.com.
Baidu ERNIE-Image: 8B DiT ranks #1 on GenEval among open models
Baidu released ERNIE-Image, an 8B diffusion transformer that ranks #1 on GenEval among open models and features precise multilingual text rendering. It is part of this week's wave of Chinese open releases in image and 3D generation.
Baidu open-sources ERNIE-4.5-VL-28B-A3B-Thinking visual reasoning model
Baidu released ERNIE-4.5-VL-28B-A3B-Thinking, an Apache 2.0 open-weights visual reasoning MoE with only 3B active parameters that claims to rival much larger models like GPT-5 High on vision tasks. It features image zooming, spatial grounding, and reasoning, with strong small-model performance attributed to GSPO training from the Qwen team.
Baidu's MuseStreamer pushes video generations past 20 seconds
Baidu showed off MuseStreamer, a video generation model producing clips longer than 20 seconds. It adds another Chinese lab to the long-form video generation race alongside Veo and Sora.
Baidu open-sources ERNIE 4.5, a 10-model multimodal family
Baidu open-sourced the ERNIE 4.5 series, a family of 10 models ranging from 424B down to 0.3B parameters with multimodal capabilities, reportedly beating o1 on DocVQA. The release marks a sharp reversal from Baidu's previous anti-open-source posture and another sign that Chinese labs are setting the pace in open source.
Baidu launches Miaoda no-code AI app building tool
Baidu introduced Miaoda, a no-code AI-powered build tool that lets users create applications without writing code. It joins the growing wave of AI-assisted app builders coming out of Chinese tech giants.
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