Baidu’s Ernie Bot to be Free Starting from April 1

On Thursday, Baidu‘s chatbot Ernie Bot’s official announcement revealed two important updates. With the continuous iteration and cost optimization of the large model, Ernie Bot will be completely free starting from midnight on April 1st. This move will undoubtedly further enhance the user coverage and market influence of Ernie Bot.

Simultaneously, Ernie Bot has also launched a deep search function, which will also be freely available to all users starting from April 1st. With its stronger thinking and planning capabilities and external tool usage, the deep search function can provide users with expert-level content responses and effectively handle multi-scenario tasks.

It is worth mentioning that this function supports multimodal input and output, providing users with a richer and more convenient search experience. Currently, users can experience the deep search function on the official website, and the app side will soon be synchronized.

On the same day, OpenAI announced on social media that GPT-4.5 and GPT-5 will be released successively, and the free version of ChatGPT can have unrestricted conversations using GPT-5 under standard intelligent settings. This means that the standard version of GPT-5 will be freely available next.

Compared to OpenAI, Ernie Bot’s subscription prices are slightly lower, but with the increasing popularity of open-source models represented by DeepSeek, many users have begun to learn about the local deployment of open-source models, putting more pressure on paid models.

Xinhua Finance quoted industry insiders as saying that the decrease in training and inference costs driven by technological breakthroughs is the underlying reason for the free release of large models by Chinese and American AI technology companies.

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