Baidu releases ERNIE 5.5 Flash Preview with open weights due by 25 November

Baidu released ERNIE 5.5 Flash Preview, its latest foundation model, at its Baidu World 2026 event, according to a press release. The mixture-of-experts model has 280 billion total parameters, activates 14 billion per token and supports a context window of 1 million tokens. Baidu says it scores competitively on benchmarks including Terminal-Bench and AutomationBench while decoding very fast.

The model is available through Baidu AI Cloud's Qianfan platform at RMB 1 per million input tokens and RMB 4 per million output tokens, is free on OpenRouter, and its weights are due to be open-sourced by 25 November.

Baidu also launched Token Exchange, a marketplace where customers can compare model services from different providers on price and performance. On hardware, it showed a Tianchi 1024-card supernode with all-optical interconnect, and its chip unit Kunlunxin said the M100 inference chip has shipped and the flagship M300 will follow in 2027. "We believe inference will be the primary driver of sustained long-term growth in the AI chip market," CEO Robin Li said. Its Apollo Go robotaxi service now covers 28 cities.