I'm traveling the world for a bit, starting with China but then hopping around the globe, anywhere. Open to any adventure. No plans, only a backpack. Hoping to meet & get to know humans from all walks of life. The pic is from a long hike on the Great Wall. For me, as a fan of history, this was an epic experience.
In China, first I'm visiting a few big cities & talking to engineers at the heart of China's AI revolution. After that, if feeling crazy enough, I'm hitchhiking (first time) across rural China for a few weeks. Hitchhiking because I think it's the best way to meet rural folks who I would otherwise never get the chance to meet. I hope to do the same in US and other places.
I have a request, if you have a travel recommendation, fill out the form(s) below if you feel like it. Or share with folks who might have advice about such travel.
Form 1 - travel recommendation:
If you can, recommend to me an interesting place I should visit anywhere in the world. For this, fill out form 1. Not touristy stuff, but something off the beaten path, that tourists may not know about, but is legendary. It could be as remote as meeting a herder in the mountains who is a local legend. Asia, Middle East, Europe, India, South/North America, Africa, Australia, anywhere. In China, I'm hoping to visit maybe Heibei, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Gansu, Sichuan, Yunnan, etc, so recommendations for spots to visit are helpful.
Form 2 - coffee:
If you want to grab a coffee with me anywhere in the world, fill out form 2 (please don't use form 1 for that).
Anyway, I hectically tossed stuff in backpack. Realizing I don't have a clear plan of any kind, which is probably the only way to do it. LFG.
Love you all ❤️
Smaller models catching up to frontier performance is one of the most interesting trends in AI right now.
The direction is clear: the gap between “affordable to train” and “capable enough to use” is narrowing fast.
Hopefully this becomes the norm. Powerful models shouldn’t require frontier-scale budgets
ERNIE 5.1 is here 🚀
ERNIE 5.1 significantly reduces pretraining cost while compressing total parameters to ~1/3 and activated parameters to ~1/2 — using only ~6% of the pretraining cost compared to models at similar scale, while achieving leading performance in its class.
💡Key highlights:
1/ Strong agentic performance approaching leading frontier models. ERNIE 5.1 surpasses DeepSeek-V4-Pro on both τ3-bench and SpreadsheetBench-Verified.
2/ Strong world knowledge and creative writing capabilities, with GPQA and MMLU-Pro performance approaching leading closed-source models, and creative writing ability nearing Gemini 3.1 Pro.
3/ Frontier-level reasoning performance. ERNIE 5.1 scores 99.6 on the challenging AIME26 benchmark with tools, second only to Gemini 3.1 Pro.
4/ Deep search capability. On May 9, ERNIE 5.1 ranked #4 globally and #1 among Chinese models on the Arena Search leaderboard with a score of 1223.
ERNIE 5.1 is now available on ERNIE and the Baidu AI Studio Model Playground:
👉https://t.co/qhd67Lg3B4
👉https://t.co/AaQSqDmVGU
👉https://t.co/uCNiypIu1q
Congrats to the ERNIE team on a great milestone! 🎉
Efficiency isn’t just a metric,it’s a philosophy. Better results per unit of compute means AI that’s more accessible, more sustainable, and more impactful. That’s a win for everyone. Looking forward to what comes next. 👀
#ERNIE #AI
Introducing ERNIE 5.1 Preview — now live! 🚀
Ranked #13 globally and #1 among Chinese labs on @arena 's Text Arena.
Top-10 worldwide across:
📐 Math — #9
⚖️ Legal & Government — #1
💼 Business, Management & Financial Ops — #4
💻 Software & IT Services — #7
Built on the strong pre-training foundation of ERNIE 5.0, ERNIE 5.1 Preview compresses total parameters to ~1/3 and activated parameters to ~1/2 of its predecessor, while using only ~6% of the pre-training cost of comparable models — delivering leading foundational performance at its scale.
Try it now 👉 https://t.co/jNwEbwrKps
More new models are on the way — stay tuned 👀
Introducing ERNIE 5.1 Preview — now live! 🚀
Ranked #13 globally and #1 among Chinese labs on @arena 's Text Arena.
Top-10 worldwide across:
📐 Math — #9
⚖️ Legal & Government — #1
💼 Business, Management & Financial Ops — #4
💻 Software & IT Services — #7
Built on the strong pre-training foundation of ERNIE 5.0, ERNIE 5.1 Preview compresses total parameters to ~1/3 and activated parameters to ~1/2 of its predecessor, while using only ~6% of the pre-training cost of comparable models — delivering leading foundational performance at its scale.
Try it now 👉 https://t.co/jNwEbwrKps
More new models are on the way — stay tuned 👀
It's easy to forget how small we are in the grand scheme of things.
This Earth Day, we're taking a moment to appreciate our planet and the vast ecosystem we share. 🌍
- Images created with ERNIE-Image
🚀 DeepSeek-V4 Preview is officially live & open-sourced! Welcome to the era of cost-effective 1M context length.
🔹 DeepSeek-V4-Pro: 1.6T total / 49B active params. Performance rivaling the world's top closed-source models.
🔹 DeepSeek-V4-Flash: 284B total / 13B active params. Your fast, efficient, and economical choice.
Try it now at https://t.co/GCdiMzk1Dl via Expert Mode / Instant Mode. API is updated & available today!
📄 Tech Report: https://t.co/drlDrxkYtp
🤗 Open Weights: https://t.co/T13Y8i7SDM
1/n
Imagine every pixel on your screen, streamed live directly from a model. No HTML, no layout engine, no code. Just exactly what you want to see.
@eddiejiao_obj, @drewocarr and I built a prototype to see how this could actually work, and set out to make it real. We're calling it Flipbook. (1/5)
Okay... I spent the morning testing Baidu's new open-source model, ERNIE-Image.
Usually, getting AI to spell text correctly on a mockup or a diagram takes hours of trial and error. You ask for a label, and it gives you random shapes instead of letters.
This one actually got it all right.
I ran two tests: a bilingual product shot and a 3D cutaway diagram.
Check out my results: ↓
BREAKING: ERNIE Image & ERNIE Image Turbo by @Baidu_Inc are #5 and #8 out of open weight models on Image Arena!
They have Elos of 1154 and 1131, and are in the same performance bands as GLM-Image and Qwen Image, respectively
Congrats to the @ErnieforDevs team on the launch!
1/ we are excited to release ERNIE-Image, after 3 months of building from scratch.
an 8b text-to-image model from baidu's ernie image team. honestly, we didn't expect an 8b dit to get this far, this fast.
strong instruction following. best-in-class text rendering. runs on a 24gb gpu.
huge thanks to the ERNIE-Image team, this wouldn't exist without an incredibly talented group of people who shipped fast and cared deeply.
thread below. 👇 👇
9/ full release: ERNIE-Image, and ERNIE-Image-Turbo (8-step distilled) + prompt enhancer + comfyui workflow + sglang version + unsloth/gguf version .
all of it. today.
we're excited to see what you build.
— ERNIE Image Team
Blog:https://t.co/l5oGYzSMM9
Demo1: https://t.co/3T5FkoAReL
Demo2: https://t.co/gdrV0VRc0A
Hugging Face:
https://t.co/RVPyjg7fPz
https://t.co/Y2vixULdwd
Github:https://t.co/bCNTM0MNM3
Art Gallery : https://t.co/A18iDorLS7
8/ one more thing, and this matters.
ernie-image works best with long, detailed, well-structured prompts. in practice, users type a short sentence.
so we built a fix: a 3b prompt enhancer, released alongside the model. it expands short inputs into detailed, structured prompts without changing what you asked for.
take a look at the left two panels first. same prompt, same image model, very different outputs depending on pe quality. the difference is telling. that's a practical lever we're explicitly handing to the community, and why we open-sourced the pe instead of keeping it internal.
now look at the right two panels. stronger llms push this even further, prompt enhancement scales with the quality of the enhancer. we're curious to see how far the community can take it.