Baidu just open-sourced its powerful ERNIE 4.5 AI models — including a 424B parameter multimodal model — yet the market hasn’t reacted. With strong benchmark results, global developer accessibility, and enterprise-grade toolkits, this move could trigger a major revaluation. BIDU looks poised to surge to $120 as investors wake up to the scale of this release.
Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU) may be one of the most misunderstood plays in AI right now. While Wall Street yawns at today’s announcement, those paying attention see a clear catalyst that could push the stock to $120 or higher in the coming weeks.
This morning, Baidu officially open-sourced its ERNIE 4.5 family of AI models, granting global developers access to its full suite under the Apache 2.0 license. It’s a move that mirrors what OpenAI did years ago — but with cutting-edge innovations that may leapfrog some U.S. and Chinese competitors.
Why This Release Matters
The ERNIE 4.5 lineup includes 10 models, spanning from ultra-efficient 0.3 billion parameter models to a behemoth with 424 billion total parameters. These models are not just larger — they’re smarter. According to Baidu’s own benchmarks, its flagship ERNIE-4.5-300B-A47B-Base outperforms DeepSeek’s V3 and other major players on 22 out of 28 benchmarks.
But size isn’t the whole story. Baidu’s models excel in multimodal understanding — meaning they can interpret and reason through both text and visual input. That’s a key differentiator as enterprises look for models that can handle complex, real-world data.
What’s more, Baidu has released ERNIEKit and FastDeploy — toolkits for fine-tuning and deployment — removing major friction points for global devs. Crucially, the models are not limited to Baidu’s PaddlePaddle framework. PyTorch compatibility means Western developers can plug and play immediately.
The Market’s Missing It
Despite the significance of this release, BIDU shares are flat to slightly down on the day — trading around $100 at last check. That’s a mistake. This isn’t just another model release. This is China’s Google unleashing its AI crown jewel to the world, with the kind of technical documentation, support tools, and performance scores that invite adoption.
While Alibaba’s Qwen and DeepSeek’s R1/V3 made headlines, Baidu’s ERNIE 4.5 is the first Chinese open-source family that seriously challenges GPT-class models across reasoning, multimodal tasks, and deployment ease.
Investors often wait for monetization stories to play out — but the groundwork is being laid now. Open-source moves are often misunderstood: they are not giveaways — they are growth hacks. By giving developers powerful free tools, Baidu ensures wide adoption, community feedback, and long-tail monetization via its cloud infrastructure and enterprise services.
Price Target: $120
With AI excitement still elevated and U.S. tech names like NVIDIA and OpenAI capturing headlines, Baidu is flying under the radar. That creates an asymmetric opportunity. If sentiment shifts even slightly and global AI researchers start building with ERNIE 4.5, the market will be forced to reprice Baidu as not just a search company — but a global AI infrastructure player.
At current levels, BIDU trades at a steep discount to its U.S. peers on a price-to-innovation basis. We believe the stock is poised for a rapid move to $120 in the near term — potentially this week — as traders catch wind of the significance of today’s release.
This is a generational AI moment — and Baidu just showed up with serious muscle.