Baidu's 2.4 trillion param GPT rival goes GA, investors love it

Chinese search engine giant Baidu announced on Thursday enterprise and consumer availability of Ernie 5.0, an omni-modal proprietary beast that made waves when it was previewed in November.

The Chinese model now ranks ahead of ChatGPT 5.1 on the LMArena leaderboard. The model's GA announcement sent the Baidu share price soaring to a four-year high, equating to a valuation boost of some $1.67 billion.

Big numbers are Ernie's thing. 

OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic haven't shared parameter numbers for their recent closed model releases, with external estimates at a range between 200 billion and 1.8 trillion across models. 

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Baidu, on the other hand, headlines the 2.4 trillion parameters for the model known as Wenxin Yiyan in China. (Thanks to an aggressive mixture-of-experts approach, less than 3% of those are active at any one time.)