Baidu, a Chinese company, offers a free AI chatbot service model to rival DeepSeek.

As fierce competition engulfs the industry, Chinese internet search engine Baidu offered its AI chatbot services free on Sunday and unveiled a new AI reasoning model.

Since their inception, Chinese IT companies have been rushing to build better AI systems. In January, DeepSeek surprised its competitors with its open source and incredibly economical methodology.

In a WeChat post, Baidu revealed that its AI chatbot, Ernie Bot, now offers its most recent X1 reasoning model, which it says performs similarly to DeepSeek’s but at a cheaper cost, as well as a new foundation model, Ernie 4.5.

Additionally, Baidu released the models for free more than two weeks early. Previously, access to the company’s most recent AI models required a monthly fee.

Although the Beijing-based startup was among the first in China to officially launch a generative AI platform in 2023, competitor chatbots from businesses like Moonshot AI and ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, have since attracted more users.

In the consumer-facing AI space, where Baidu confronts fierce competition, the company DeepSeek upended the market both domestically and internationally with a model that outperformed rivals like ChatGPT, which is based in the US, but was far less expensive to build.

While other software firms have been catching up, Chinese businesses and local government organizations have since hurried to integrate DeepSeek’s open-source methodology into their projects.

The R1 reasoning model from DeepSeek has been included into Baidu’s search engine.

Tencent, the company that owns WeChat, introduced a new AI model in February that it said could answer questions more quickly than DeepSeek, despite integrating its competitor’s technology into its messaging app.

on the same month, Alibaba said that it will invest 380 billion yuan ($52 billion) on artificial intelligence over the next three years. Alibaba and Apple have teamed to create AI for Apple’s phones in China.

This month, Alibaba also unveiled an updated AI assistant app that uses its Qwen reasoning model, which is open-source.

Additionally, Baidu has declared its intention to follow DeepSeek’s example by making its Ernie AI models publicly available starting on June 30.