Baidu introduced its new language model on its release page on 11 November. ERNIE 5.5 Flash Preview is the first post-trained version of the ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base model, whose weights Baidu released earlier in November, the company said. The base model only continues the text it is given. Technology site Pandaily reported that the Preview model adds reasoning and tool calls.

Baidu said the model is strong at coding, 3D modelling, knowledge work and content creation. Chinese technology outlet Leiphone reported that the model achieved competitive scores on benchmarks including Terminal-Bench and AutomationBench. Pandaily noted that these are Baidu’s own claims.

Baidu itself warned that the Preview model is an intermediate stage of unfinished post-training and that some of its capabilities may still fall short. The company plans to improve the model based on user feedback before the official release.

Architecture and Baidu’s examples

Baidu’s vLLM-ERNIE repository describes the model as an MoE model: its layers contain 512 expert networks, and ten are selected for each token. The model has 280 billion parameters, but uses 14 billion of them to process each token.

In 37 of the model’s 43 layers, the cache stores the 128 most recent tokens and one compressed entry for each 128-token block. The base model was pretrained with a context of up to 128,000 tokens, but supports a context of about 1 million tokens (1,048,576) at inference. Leiphone reported that the model generates more than 200 tokens per second, but did not give the measurement conditions.

As an example, Baidu said the model wrote a third-person game for Unreal Engine 5.8 in C++ during a single 11-hour coding task. The model worked in a harness, a program that controls the agent, gives the model its tools and runs its work steps. The model handles only text and cannot see the screen. It therefore turned bugs spotted in playtesting, such as a character hovering above the ground, into measurable tests in code.

Availability, pricing and weights

The model is available through the API of Baidu’s Qianfan cloud service. Pandaily reported that Qianfan’s model list, updated on 10 November, gives the ernie-5.5-flash-preview endpoint a default rate limit of 60 requests and 1 million tokens per minute. Leiphone said 1 million input tokens cost 2 yuan at peak times and 1 yuan off-peak. The corresponding output prices are 8 and 4 yuan. A time-limited 50 per cent discount also applies.

Baidu promises to release the weights soon under the Apache 2.0 licence, on 25 November, according to Leiphone. When Pandaily checked on 11 November, the Preview model’s Hugging Face repository returned an access error, and Baidu’s public listing showed only the two versions of the base model.

To run the weights, Baidu offers the vLLM-ERNIE plugin, which requires vLLM 0.32.0 and NVIDIA GPUs. The instructions are in the baidu/vLLM-ERNIE repository on GitHub. They state that the base model’s FP8 weights take up about 280 gigabytes. Running them requires at least two 288-gigabyte, four 192-gigabyte or eight 80-gigabyte GPUs. The 1 million-token context does not fit on 80-gigabyte GPUs.