Baidu ERNIE
ERNIE 5 — Baidu's frontier Chinese-English bilingual LLM API
Baidu ERNIE is the LLM API from Baidu, China's largest search company. The ERNIE 5 series includes ERNIE-5.1 (balanced) and ERNIE-5.0 (frontier), both optimised for Chinese-English bilingual tasks, knowledge retrieval, and enterprise applications. Pricing is in USD via the international API.
ERNIE 5 is the leading Chinese-English bilingual LLM API, backed by Baidu's search knowledge graph — the go-to choice for applications targeting Chinese-language users.
- Strong Chinese-English bilingual performance — best-in-class for Chinese language tasks
- Deep integration with Baidu Search knowledge graph
- ERNIE-5.1 at $0.56/$2.53 per 1M tokens is competitive for a frontier-tier bilingual model
- Enterprise-grade reliability backed by Baidu's infrastructure
- Primarily optimised for Chinese — English performance trails frontier Western models
- Limited ecosystem outside China; fewer third-party integrations
- Documentation and support primarily in Chinese
Baidu ERNIE Models
| Model | Modality | Tier | Price | Cached /1M | TTFT | Throughput | Context | Intel. | Caps | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
ERNIE-5.1 ERNIE 5 | Chat | advanced | $0.56/ $2.53 in / out per 1M EST Oct 2026 | — | 600ms | 100 t/s | 128K | 78 | ||
ERNIE-5.0 ERNIE 5 | Chat | frontier | $1.40/ $5.60 in / out per 1M EST Oct 2026 | — | 700ms | 80 t/s | 128K | 82 |
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Baidu ERNIE is a proprietary AI lab that develops and hosts its own large language models. Baidu ERNIE is the LLM API from Baidu, China's largest search company. The ERNIE 5 series includes ERNIE-5.1 (balanced) and ERNIE-5.0 (frontier), both optimised for Chinese-English bilingual tasks, knowledge retrieval, and enterprise applications. Pricing is in USD via the international API. Common use cases include Chinese NLP, Bilingual applications, Knowledge retrieval, Enterprise chat. Headquartered in Beijing, China, founded 2000. All models are accessible via a REST API compatible with standard OpenAI-style request formats, enabling drop-in integration with most LLM frameworks and orchestration tools.
Baidu ERNIE vs other LLM providers
Baidu ERNIE competes with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Groq, Together AI, Mistral, Cohere, and other inference API providers across dimensions of price, throughput, latency, context window, and model intelligence. ERNIE 5 is the leading Chinese-English bilingual LLM API, backed by Baidu's search knowledge graph — the go-to choice for applications targeting Chinese-language users. Use the LLM provider comparison tool to see Baidu ERNIE token pricing, latency, and throughput side-by-side with any other provider. The full LLM pricing table shows all providers ranked by input token cost, output token cost, and throughput in a single sortable view.
Why choose Baidu ERNIE?
Baidu ERNIE stands out because: ERNIE 5 is the leading Chinese-English bilingual LLM API, backed by Baidu's search knowledge graph — the go-to choice for applications targeting Chinese-language users.. The API currently offers 2 models, spanning 1 frontier, 1 advanced tiers. For teams running high-volume inference workloads, prompt caching and batch API endpoints can reduce effective input token costs by 50–90% — check the context window cost guide for a full breakdown of caching economics.
Understanding Baidu ERNIE token pricing
Baidu ERNIE charges separately for input (prompt) and output (completion) tokens, priced per 1M tokens in USD. Output tokens are typically 3–5× more expensive than input tokens due to the compute cost of autoregressive generation. The cheapest {meta.name} input rate is currently $0.56/1M tokens. Prices shown are sourced from Baidu ERNIE's public pricing page and updated every 15 minutes. Need help estimating your spend? Read the LLM API cost calculator guide — it covers tokens, context windows, prompt caching, and batch discounts with worked examples for RAG, chat history, and document processing workloads.
Baidu ERNIE context window and model capabilities
Context window size directly affects both capability and cost — every token in the context window is charged as an input token. Baidu ERNIE's largest context window is 128K tokens. For RAG and document processing workloads, longer context windows enable richer retrieval but increase per-call costs proportionally. Prompt caching — where supported — stores the KV state of repeated prefixes and charges 75–90% less for cache hits, making it the most impactful cost optimization for applications with consistent system prompts or retrieved documents. See the LLM context window cost guide for a full analysis of how context length affects your API bill.
Self-hosted vs managed inference: when Baidu ERNIE makes sense
Managed inference APIs like Baidu ERNIE eliminate infrastructure overhead — no GPU provisioning, driver management, or model serving stack to maintain. The trade-off is cost at scale: a single H100 at ~$2.50/hr can serve ~500K tokens/min of Llama 3.3 70B, which at Baidu ERNIE API rates would cost significantly more per token. The break-even point depends on your request volume, latency requirements, and engineering capacity. For teams processing fewer than ~10M tokens/day, managed APIs are almost always cheaper when total cost of ownership is considered. Above that threshold, self-hosted inference on rented GPU compute typically wins on unit economics. Read the cheapest GPU cloud guide for a full break-even analysis. Historical Baidu ERNIE token price data is available in the LLM price history charts.
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