Baidu releases open-weights model that beats GPT-class on Chinese-language reasoning

Baidu's ERNIE-X 350B landed on Friday with permissive commercial terms and benchmark scores that, on Chinese-language reasoning, edge past the GPT-class incumbents it was measured against.

The release matters less for the leaderboard than for the licence. For the first time a frontier-tier Chinese model can be self-hosted and shipped in a commercial product without a bespoke agreement.

Three Vietnamese banks have already pulled the weights into internal evaluation sandboxes, drawn by data-residency control as much as by cost.

The open question is durability: open-weights releases have a habit of arriving with fanfare and quietly stagnating. Baidu says a 3B and a 30B variant follow this quarter.