GPT 4.5 level for 1% of the price

Pricing and headline claim

• ERNIE 4.5 is advertised at very low prices (around $0.55M / $2.2M tokens in / out), with open weights promised in June.
• Several commenters question the title’s “GPT‑4.5 level for 1% of the price”: Baidu’s own tweet doesn’t make that explicit, and many see it more as a GPT‑4o‑class competitor.

Model quality and benchmarks

• The main comparative chart averages 15 benchmarks, mixing standard English tasks with six Chinese-language benchmarks.
• ERNIE 4.5 strongly outperforms GPT‑4.5 on several Chinese benchmarks, which pulls up the overall average; on most difficult general benchmarks it appears weaker or only tied on saturated tasks.
• Some call this cherry-picking and deliberate misrepresentation; others note that Western labs also game benchmarks.
• There is discussion that GPT‑4.5 itself is a “non‑reasoning” model, with modern reasoning models outperforming it at higher token cost.

Access, language, and UX

• Access to yiyan.baidu.com is effectively limited: interface is Chinese, and registration appears to require a Chinese phone number.
• Users found workarounds (one free answer, scraping via browser dev tools), suggesting access throttling is about cost control.
• Early hands-on impressions: capable but “cringe” for precise coding tasks, tending to negotiate or simplify requirements; suspected to be tuned heavily on Chinese forum data.

Geopolitics and tech competition

• Many see this as another signal that China is rapidly catching up or leading in AI, paralleling its rise in hardware, EVs, batteries, etc.
• Others push back against “collapse of Western tech” narratives, framing it instead as loss of US monopoly and normalization of competition.
• There is concern over authoritarian governance in China vs. declining US democracy, but also argument that hegemonic powers (US included) are inherently problematic.
• Some suggest US political choices (e.g., cutting research funding, restricting immigration) are weakening its talent base relative to China.

Implications for OpenAI and Western AI firms

• Commenters argue OpenAI’s moat is eroding: Chinese open-weight models at tiny prices undercut its closed, high‑cost offerings.
• Speculation that OpenAI is losing money per user and survives on massive fundraising and hopes of high‑priced “AI agent” subscriptions.
• Debate over whether Baidu’s pricing is sustainable or heavily subsidized; others note Chinese strength in hardware optimization and cost-down engineering.

Open vs closed, IP, and censorship

• The availability of strong open-weight Chinese models intensifies criticism of OpenAI/Anthropic’s closed stance and regulatory ambitions.
• Some argue all major LLMs, Western and Chinese, rely on mass “IP theft” of training data; others focus specifically on state‑directed Chinese IP acquisition.
• There is broad recognition that all major models are ideologically filtered; some see Chinese AIs as enforcing CCP narratives, others see US models as similarly censored along Western liberal lines.
• A few propose regulatory responses such as banning Chinese LLMs in the US or, conversely, forcing open‑weights for any model trained on unowned data.

Economic dynamics and future of AI

• Several see AI as a “race to zero”: intense US–China competition compressing margins, with Nvidia (hardware) the main durable winner and most model providers commoditized.
• Others counter that “intelligence can’t be a commodity” because complex problem spaces are effectively unbounded.
• Very low prices are expected to unlock new use cases, but there is skepticism that truly transformative, widely adopted applications beyond coding assistance and niche productivity have yet emerged.