Baidu is ready to roll its open-source Erny AI model today, a step that can have far-reaching impact on the global AI industry. This will be the first time that a top level Chinese AI company is providing its ownership model to the public, sparking compared to the launch of Deepsek-R1, which disrupted global markets when going to open sources last year.

The step announced by Baidu in February initially is now being executed in the stages. At that time, the company said that it would provide its “next generation AI model” to developers, and many believe that it refers to Erni 5. It follows Erni 4.5 earlier release and the company’s first logic model Erne X1, both were to strengthen the position of Badu in the fast -growing AI space.

While Baidu has already made its chatbot free to use, today’s open-source rollout is different. This brings the main access to developers and researchers, but still uncertainty how much the model Baidu is really opening. It is yet to be confirmed whether the company will open a completely open-source Erny, which means that this training will share everything from data to model architecture, or adopt partial release, where only model weight is made public.

The difference between two approaches is important. A fully open-source model not only allows developers to use and fine-tune, but also repeat it completely and build new equipment on top of it. In contrast, partially open models allow limited flexibility. This difference has become an important point in AI circles, especially as global companies such as meta (with Lama 3) and Mistral has chosen for various levels of openness.

Industry experts say the change of Baidu in the strategy may have an impact on both Chinese and global AI firms. “Every time a major laboratory opens a powerful model, it increases the bar for the entire industry,” Scene Rain told CNBC, Associate Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Southern California.

Baidu’s move also puts pressure on US-based firms such as Openai and Ethropot, which continue to offer payments, off systems. With the increasing demand for more affordable and accessible AI solutions, open-source models such as Erney can attract developers from emerging markets including India. Will the Erni correspond to the effect of Deepsek-R1.