Baidu today began offering its Ernie AI artificial intelligence model as open source. Previously, to access Ernie, a monthly subscription to the Ernie Bot service was required. Baidu's move is seen as an effort to increase adoption in various applications in China by reducing the cost of accessing the API that developers have to pay.
The announcement of offering Ernie as open source comes at a time when Baidu has a smaller market share than Bytedance and DeepSeek. For example, Ernie Bot has 23 million users compared to Bytedance's Doubao which has 87 million users.
The AI ecosystem is now increasingly filled with new models that require expensive subscriptions. At the same time, even at this T20 subscription price, companies like OpenAI and xAI have yet to record any profits.
Models hold a large market today and are waiting to reap future profits like Amazon was once the choice of the majority of AI companies in the world. This raises the question of whether the winner is the best or simply has better cash flow.