China puts American AI industry on notice yet again with Ernie X1, Baidu's new open-source reasoning model

Chinese tech giant Baidu released open-source AI models Ernie X1 and Ernie 4.5. - The company says the models rival those from OpenAI and DeepSeek in performance per cost. - The models also further the AI industry's turn toward open-source. Baidu, China's answer to Google, has released two new AI…