Baidu unveils proprietary ERNIE 5 beating GPT-5 performance on charts, document understanding and more

Mere hours after OpenAI updated its flagship foundation model GPT-5 to GPT-5.1, promising reduced token usage overall and a more pleasant personality with more preset options, Chinese search giant Baidu unveiled its next-generation foundation model, ERNIE 5.0, alongside a suite of AI product upgrades and strategic international expansions. The goal: to position as a global …

Weibo’s new open source AI model VibeThinker-1.5B outperforms DeepSeek-R1 on $7,800 post-training budget

Another day in late 2025, another impressive result from a Chinese company in open source artificial intelligence. Chinese social networking company Weibo’s AI division recently released its open source VibeThinker-1.5B—a 1.5 billion parameter large language model (LLM) that is a fine-tuned variant of rival Chinese tech firm Alibaba’s Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B. It’s available now for free download …

When AI draws our words: Study finds image generators fail basic instructions despite aesthetic success

Can we really trust artificial intelligence to illustrate our ideas? A team of scientists has examined the capabilities of Midjourney and DALL·E—two Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) software programs—to produce images from simple sentences. The verdict is mixed… between aesthetic feats and beginner’s mistakes, machines still have a long way to go.

Baidu just dropped an open-source multimodal AI that it claims beats GPT-5 and Gemini

Baidu Inc., China’s largest search engine company, released a new artificial intelligence model on Monday that its developers claim outperforms competitors from Google and OpenAI on several vision-related benchmarks despite using a fraction of the computing resources typically required for such systems. The model, dubbed ERNIE-4.5-VL-28B-A3B-Thinking, is the latest salvo in an escalating competition among …

Mind readers: How large language models encode theory-of-mind

Imagine you’re watching a movie, in which a character puts a chocolate bar in a box, closes the box and leaves the room. Another person, also in the room, moves the bar from a box to a desk drawer. You, as an observer, know that the treat is now in the drawer, and you also …

Meta returns to open source AI with Omnilingual ASR models that can transcribe 1,600+ languages natively

Meta has just released a new multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) system supporting 1,600+ languages — dwarfing OpenAI’s open source Whisper model, which supports just 99. Is architecture also allows developers to extend that support to thousands more. Through a feature called zero-shot in-context learning, users can provide a few paired examples of audio and …