Baidu released ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base

(ernie.baidu.com)

48 points | by pretext 2 hours ago

7 comments

  • speedping 1 hour ago
    ERNIE feels old, like BERT. They either need a rebrand or fully embrace retro-dawn-of-ML vibes
    • josh-wrale 42 minutes ago
      Bert and Ernie. Ring a bell? Sesame Steeet
    • lofties 52 minutes ago
      BERT models are still amazing for what they do. Even the latest JEV/KEV/SEV/BEV/REV/TREV models can't beat a well-trained BERT.
      • throwaw12 43 minutes ago
        do you have examples of open weight BERT models from hugging face which are trained for specific use cases?
    • NSUserDefaults 1 hour ago
      I'd try DONALD for sure, if I wanted to kill a project.
      • ahoka 1 hour ago
        But they didn't give a DONALD.
      • yehoshuapw 1 hour ago
        Make AI Great Again?
        • selectodude 1 hour ago
          SI*
          • throwaw12 42 minutes ago
            Trump just realised that he can't use MAGA for Making SI Great Again, probably giving an executive order to reverse SI to AI again, to be able to claim Make AI Great Again
            • swingboy 31 minutes ago
              I am PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE that SI will be America’s 51st STATE and will be RENAMED to “American Intelligence”! Thank you for your attention to this matter!
      • locknitpicker 42 minutes ago
        > I'd try DONALD for sure, if I wanted to kill a project.

        The current version is threatening to veto all my prompts.

        • rob74 17 minutes ago
          ...and when it makes a mistake, it blames anything or anyone else but itself, or insists that what it did is perfect the way it is and that it's still the smartest model in the world?
        • whoanoway 34 minutes ago
          [dead]
  • A_D_E_P_T 1 hour ago
    This is awesome. ERNIE seems more powerful than Qwen3.8-27B and Deepseek-v4-Flash, which AFAIK are currently the best base models... it'll be very interesting to experiment with when it hits OpenCode. Base models are also excellent for businesses who run models locally, as they can be trained in various house rules and house styles.
    • input_sh 1 hour ago
      They're comparing it to Deepseek-v4-Flash, not 4.1 and not the 4.1 1017 update, so essentially two versions behind the latest version of Deepseek Flash.
      • Tepix 23 minutes ago
        DeepSeek 4.1 Flash is twice the size of this and difficult to run locally. Makes more sense to compare it to DS4F.
    • irthomasthomas 1 hour ago
      Qwen3.8-27B has no base model version in the wild that I can see?
      • speedgoose 29 minutes ago
        Isn’t the latest Qwen 3 public base model… Qwen 3?
      • A_D_E_P_T 27 minutes ago
        [dead]
  • Tepix 24 minutes ago
    That's an interesting size, it will fit into 2x128GB at decent (≥4bpw) quantization.
  • roryirvine 1 hour ago
    Am I the only one to feel sad that the name means "Enhanced Representation through kNowledge IntEgration", rather than being a homage to a very famous 1950s random number generator?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premium_Bonds#ERNIE

    • jojogeo 57 minutes ago
      For me I see ERNIE as BERT's long time friend and room mate.

      How do I look Ernie? ... with your eyes, Bert.

    • cubefox 50 minutes ago
      It's a homage to BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), Google's influential 2018 Transformer model that wasn't autoregressive. https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805v2
  • weijiejason119 2 hours ago
    anyone tried this? is it good?
    • spwa4 1 hour ago
      It's not instruction finetuned, so no, it's not good to use for anything like coding agents.
  • haunter 1 hour ago
    OT

    dropped is the worst word in this context because it can both mean ‘released’ or ‘terminated/ended’

    Baidu dropped ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base = Baidu released a new version of their software

    Baidu dropped ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base = Baidu ended the support of their software

    • swiftcoder 59 minutes ago
      I think in contemporary parlance this sufficiently clear. Nobody thought massdrop was where you went to buy end-of-life products.
  • spwa4 1 hour ago
    TLDR: Ernie 5.5 Flash base 280B params 14B active

    A chunk better than Deepseek 1017, at half the parameter count, BUT it's only a base model, not finetuned to follow instructions.

    Strange to release a model in this state. OpenAI is also "probably" releasing new models (sources within OpenAI talking about Sol 6.2 and the like). We must be getting really close to the Qwen4 releases.

    • adrian_b 2 minutes ago
      Many others, e.g. Google and NVIDIA, have also released such BASE models.

      For those with the knowledge and resources to finalize the training, BASE models are much more useful than completely trained models.

      BASE models are the next best thing after truly open-source LLMs, where you would have access to the complete dataset used for training. Besides the fact that nobody who had used a really big dataset wants to show it, due to possible legal problems, having access to the original dataset would not be helpful for most people, because they would not be able to use it to make an LLM, due to its huge size and due to the vast resources required for pre-training.

      On the other hand, continuing training from a BASE model, which is greatly compressed in comparison with the original dataset, is feasible for many.

    • cubefox 48 minutes ago
      > Strange to release a model in this state.

      No, they explain why they do it.

    • v9v 1 hour ago
      I believe they compare to DSv4, not DSv4.1 1017.
      • wolttam 1 hour ago
        Specifically V4-Flash-Base from April.