“In initial benchmarks, both of these models have been measured as being roughly on par with OpenAI and DeepSeek models and slightly behind Grok 3 beta and Google Gemini 2.5 Pro,” said Hyoun Park, CEO and chief analyst at Amalgam Insights. “Baidu’s Ernie 4.5 Turbo Measures up on par with OpenAI’s newest GPT models while being priced much more competitively than OpenAI.”
Analysts also point out that Chinese AI models are reaching performance levels comparable to Western counterparts at a fraction of the cost, between 20 and 40 times lower, putting pressure on US firms to speed up innovation and cut prices.
“However, ongoing geopolitical tensions are likely to restrict the use of Chinese models in regulated sectors,” said Prabhu Ram, VP of the industry research group at Cybermedia Research. “Consequently, established market players will need to respond to these emerging start-ups by increasing investment in domestic AI development, while managing higher operational costs in a significantly more fragmented and geopolitically complex technology landscape.”