Baidu releases ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base weights under licence barring South Korea, EU and UK

Baidu published the weights of ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base on its official blog and on Hugging Face on November 5, 2026, according to aitimes.com. The release is a base model without instruction tuning or reinforcement learning, intended for developers to build their own models on top of it.

ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base is a mixture-of-experts model with 280 billion total parameters, of which 14 billion are activated per token. It was pretrained on 33.5 trillion tokens and supports a context length of up to 1 million tokens.

In Baidu's own evaluation across 30 benchmarks against DeepSeek V4 Flash Base, Tencent Hy3 Preview Base and Xiaomi MiMo V2.5 Base, ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base scored highest on 24. It recorded 78.4 on MMLU-Pro and 82.3 on HumanEval+. The competing models beat it on some Chinese-language knowledge tests and some long-context tasks.

Licence terms

Baidu's licence excludes South Korea, the European Union and the United Kingdom from the permitted territories. Commercial use carries no model fee for products with annual revenue of $50 million or less, provided Baidu is notified in advance and attribution is given; above that threshold, written approval is required.

Baidu said it plans to release a fully trained ERNIE 5.5 Flash in the future. The company was the first among major Chinese big tech firms to launch a ChatGPT-like chatbot, in 2023. CEO Yanhong Li long stressed the competitiveness of closed models but shifted toward publishing weights after DeepSeek's success last year.