Thursday, The official announcement of Baidu’schatbot Ernie Bot revealed two important updates. Ernie Bot is now completely free as of midnight on April 1, 2019. This is due to the continual iteration and cost-optimization of the large model. This move will certainly increase the user coverage and market impact of Ernie Bot.
Ernie Bot also launched a deep-search function that will be available to all users for free starting April 1. The deep search function, with its enhanced thinking and planning capabilities as well as the use of external tools, can provide users expert-level content answers and effectively handle multiple-scenario task.
This function is multimodal, allowing for a richer search experience. Users can currently experience the deep-search function on the official site, and the app will be synchronized soon.
OpenAI announced in social media on the same day that GPT-4.5 will be released sequentially and the free version ChatGPT allows for unrestricted GPT-5 conversations under standard intelligent settings. The standard version of GPT-5 is the next free release.
Ernie Bot’s subscription price is slightly lower than OpenAI. However, with the growing popularity of DeepSeek and other open-source models in the market, users are now more aware of the local deployment options, which puts pressure on paid models.
Xinhua Finance cited industry insiders who said that the reduction in training and inference cost driven by technological advancements is the underlying cause for the free release by Chinese and American AI tech companies of large models.
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