Baidu made its AI model Ernie 4.5 open source, inspired by DeepSeek's success.CEO Robin Li previously said closed-source models were more powerful and economical.Baidu's shares surged last week after announcing its AI chatbot will be free from April 1.

Chinese search engine group Baidu , said on Tuesday that the success of AI company DeepSeek had inspired it to embrace an open source model, under which the source code of its upcoming generative AI chatbot release will be publicly available.

The company, the operator of China’s most popular search engine, announced the plan today. Reuters reported that the initiative centers on an upcoming family of Ernie models dubbed the Ernie 4.5 series. Baidu will start rolling out the LLM series to users in the coming months and plans to open-source its code on June 30.

Baidu Inc. has taken the unprecedented step of declaring its Ernie AI model free for users, a move that could help the Chinese search giant regain momentum in a race to develop next-generation artificial intelligence.