Chinese search giant Baidu, known for its search technology, has made its Ernie large language model open source as of June 30.
It's a shot across the bow of DeepSeek, China's premier LLM, which has seen unprecedented success since it debuted in December 2024.
It's also a big change of approach for Baidu. The company had previously been vocal in its defiance of moving to open source, working to keep its business model proprietary.
DeepSeek and other international rivals like ChatGPT have proven that being open source can lead to a more impressive LLMs, and still be lucrative.
Baidu goes open source
While the change could not be as monumental as the arrival of DeepSeek, it could have major ramifications for AI.
“This isn’t just a China story," Sean Ren, associate professor of computer science at the University of Southern California and Samsung’s AI Researcher of the Year told CNBC.
"Every time a major lab open-sources a powerful model, it raises the bar for the entire industry."
"While most consumers don’t care whether a model’s code is open-sourced, they do care about lower costs, better performance, and support for their language or region," Ren added.
"Those benefits often come from open models, which give developers and researchers more freedom to iterate, customize, and deploy faster."
Baidu's move to open source could also help provide more competition to its aforementioned rivals.
If Baidu's model is able to offer comparative features to rivals, but at a lower price, it could be seen as a moment that reverberates through the industry.
Earlier this year, Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, discussed open source models on Reddit.
“While OpenAI has open-sourced models in the past, the company has generally favored a proprietary, closed source development approach,” Altman explained.
”[I personally think we need to] figure out a different open source strategy,” he added.
“Not everyone at OpenAI shares this view, and it’s also not our current highest priority … We will produce better models [going forward], but we will maintain less of a lead than we did in previous years.”
Expect Baidu's model to be under plenty of scrutiny, too. This week, Germany moved to ban DeepSeek for transferring data to China.
What does open-source mean?
In AI, the term open-source refers to systems where the code and training data is made publicly available.
This is becoming more common recently, with the likes of OpenAI, Deepseek and Gemini all releasing open-source versions of their products.
With an open-source AI model, the public can inspect, adapt and distribute the code in their own way. This speeds up the process for smaller companies who aren't able to put in the huge amount of work at the start that is needed.
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