Baidu drops open-source ERNIE multimodal model that "thinks with images"
Baidu just open-sourced ERNIE-4.5-VL-28B-A3B-Thinking under an Apache 2.0 license. The model boasts 28B total parameters but activates only 3B at runtime, featuring a dynamic zoom-in mechanism to inspect visual details. Baidu claims it beats Gemini 2.5 Pro and GPT-5-High on key visual reasoning benchmarks, though independent testing is still pending.