As fierce rivalry engulfs the industry, Chinese internet search giant Baidu unveiled a new AI reasoning model and offered its AI chatbot services to customers for free.

Since their inception, Chinese IT companies have been rushing to build better AI platforms. In January, DeepSeek surprised its competitors with its open-source and incredibly economical methodology.

Baidu announced the release of a new foundation model, Ernie 4.5, and its most recent X1 reasoning model, which it says performs similarly to DeepSeek's but at a cheaper cost, in a WeChat post.

Additionally, Baidu released Ernie Bot, an AI chatbot, for free for individual users over two weeks ahead of schedule. Access to the company's most recent AI models through Ernie Bot used to require a membership.

Ernie 4.5 "outperforms" US-based OpenAI's GPT-4.5 model in "multiple benchmarks", while Ernie X1 features "enhanced capabilities in understanding, planning, reflection, and evolution", Baidu says.

Although the Beijing-based startup was among the first in China to officially launch a generative AI platform in 2023, competitor chatbots from businesses like Moonshot AI and ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, have since attracted more users.

In the consumer-facing AI space, where Baidu faces fierce competition, the startup DeepSeek upended the market both domestically and internationally with a model that outperformed rivals like ChatGPT, which is based in the US, but was significantly less expensive to build.

While other software firms have been catching up, Chinese businesses and local government organisations have since hurried to integrate DeepSeek's open-source methodology into their projects.

The R1 reasoning model from DeepSeek has been incorporated into Baidu's search engine.

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Tencent, the company that owns WeChat, introduced a new AI model in February that it said could answer questions more quickly than DeepSeek, despite integrating its competitor's technology into its messaging app.