Ernie Bot (Chinese:文心一言, Pinyin: wénxīn yīyán), full name Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration, is an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by the Chinese technology company Baidu. Ernie Bot rivals GPT models in Chinese NLP tasks. It is built on the company's ERNIE series of large language models, which have been in development since 2019. The service was first launched for invited testing on March 16, 2023, and was released to the general public on August 31, 2023, after receiving approval from Chinese regulators.
Since its public launch, Ernie Bot has undergone several updates, with newer versions like ERNIE 4.0 and 4.5 released to improve its capabilities. The service has seen rapid user adoption, reportedly reaching over 200 million users by April 2024. It has been integrated into various products, notably powering AI features for the Chinese release of Samsung's Galaxy S24 smartphones.
Ernie Bot was initially released for invited testing on March 16, 2023. The live release demo was reported to have been prerecorded, which caused Baidu's stock to drop 10 percent on the day of the launch. The company's stock gained 14 percent the following day after analysts from Citigroup and Bank of America tested Ernie Bot and gave it positive preliminary reviews.
On August 31, 2023, Ernie Bot was released to the public after receiving approval from Chinese regulatory authorities. By December 2023, Baidu announced the service had surpassed 100 million users.
In January 2024, Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post reported that a university research lab linked to the People's Liberation Army (PLA) had tested Ernie Bot for military response scenarios. Baidu denied the allegations, stating it had no connection with the academic paper. That same month, Ernie was integrated into Samsung's Galaxy S24 lineup for its launch in China.
The user base reportedly grew to 200 million by April 2024 and 300 million by June 2024. In September 2024, Baidu changed the chatbot's Chinese name from "Wenxin Yiyan" (文心一言) to "Wenxiaoyan" (文小言) to position it as a search assistant.
On March 16, 2025, Baidu announced version 4.5 and the reasoning model ERNIE X1. The following month, at the Create2025 Baidu AI Developer Conference, the company released the Wenxin 4.5 Turbo and Wenxin X1 Turbo models.
Development
Ernie Bot is based on Baidu's ERNIE (Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration) series of foundation models. The general training process begins with pre-training on large datasets, followed by refinement using techniques like supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning with human feedback, and prompt engineering.
Foundation models
Ernie 3.0
The model powering the initial launch of Ernie Bot was trained with 10 billion parameters on a 4-terabyte corpus consisting of plain text and a large-scale knowledge graph.
Ernie 3.5
Released in June 2023. At the time of release, its performance was reported as "slightly inferior" to OpenAI's GPT-4.
Ernie 4.0
Unveiled at Baidu World on 17 October 2023, and made available to paying subscribers on 1 November 2023 for 59.90 yuan a month, while the earlier version remained free.
According to Baidu, this version featured improved performance over its predecessor, with information updated to April 2023.
ERNIE 4.5 was released open-weights. One reason cited by Robin Li was that DeepSeek showed that open-weights release can greatly help adoption.
Ernie X1
Announced on 16 March 2025 together with Ernie 4.5, with Ernie X1 positioned as a specialized reasoning model.
Baidu stated that performance improvements were achieved through new technologies such as "FlashMask" dynamic attention masking and a heterogeneous multimodal mixture-of-experts architecture.
Turbo Models
In June 2024, Baidu announced Ernie 4.0 Turbo. In April 2025, Ernie 4.5 Turbo and X1 Turbo were released.
These models are optimized for faster response times and lower operational costs.
Service
In its subscription options, the professional plan gives users access to Ernie 4.0 with a payment either for a month or with reduced payment for auto-renewal per month. Meanwhile, Ernie 3.5 is free of charge.
Ernie 4.0, the language model for Ernie bot, has information updated to April 2023.
1234"Meet Ernie, China's answer to ChatGPT". The Economist. 3 September 2023. ISSN0013-0613. Archived from the original on 2023-09-03. Retrieved 2023-09-03. On matters of politics, by contrast, the chatbot is rather quiet. Ernie is confused by questions such as "Who is China's president?" and will tell you the name of Xi Jinping's mother, but not those of his siblings. It draws a blank if asked about the drawbacks of socialism. It often attempts to redirect sensitive conversations by saying: "Let's talk about something else." Ernie's reticence will come as no shock to Chinese users familiar with a heavily censored internet.
↑Feng, Emily (May 29, 2024). "Why China, and now Taiwan, are making their own chatbots using their own data". NPR. Retrieved May 29, 2024. ERNIE, developed by Chinese internet company Baidu. But ERNIE has to follow Chinese censorship rules and political mores, including, for example, saying in answers that Taiwan is part of China - because only training a model on data from China could make a pro-China LLM.
