At today's Baidu World Conference, Baidu founder, chairman, and CEO Robin Li officially launched the ERNIE Bot 5.0, defining it as a "unified native multimodal model." This name not only announces Baidu's technological leap in the field of multimodal AI, but also marks the official entry of domestic large models into a new era where text, images, and sounds are deeply integrated and naturally coordinated.

Native Multimodal: Not 'Concatenation', but 'Symbiosis'

Different from the industry's mainstream 'multimodal concatenation' approach (such as using a visual model to identify an image first, then a language model to generate a description), ERNIE Bot 5.0 achieves unified representation and joint training of text, images, and speech at the underlying architecture level. This means the model no longer 'sees first, then thinks,' but rather 'sees, hears, and understands simultaneously,' enabling it to naturally handle complex cross-modal tasks such as "describing the emotional changes of people in this photo" or "generating poetry that matches this melody." Li emphasized: "It has true self-learning and iteration capabilities, with significantly improved reasoning efficiency and generalization performance."

The Qianfan Platform is Fully Opened, Developers Can Call It with One Click

Starting today, ERNIE Bot 5.0 has been launched on Baidu's intelligent cloud Qianfan Large Model Platform. Enterprises and developers can directly call its multimodal capabilities to quickly build applications such as intelligent customer service, AI creation, industrial quality inspection, and multimodal search. Baidu has also optimized API response speed and cost structure, promoting large models from being "usable" to "easy to use, convenient, and low-cost."

"Intelligence Itself Is the Largest Application"

In his speech, Li reiterated his core philosophy: "In the past, we always tried to find AI's 'killer application,' but today I want to say—intelligence itself is the largest application." He believes that large models should not be limited to single scenarios, but should be integrated into the entire product stack, such as operating systems, search, office, and travel, just like water and electricity. In the future, Baidu will deeply embed ERNIE Bot 5.0 into the entire product series, including ERNIE Bot, Baidu Search, Xiaodu Smart Speaker, and Apollo Autonomous Driving, achieving "intelligent everywhere."

Strategic Significance: A Paradigm Breakthrough for Domestic Large Models

While global large models are still primarily focused on language capabilities, Baidu chose "native multimodal" as an entry point, not only avoiding homogenized competition in the pure text field, but also aligning with China's urgent demand for the integration of visual, language, and voice in practical applications—for example, understanding graphic and text work orders in smart factories, multimodal diagnostic assistance in medical imaging, and interactive teaching in educational scenarios where "describing pictures" is involved.