Baidu's Ernie 5.1 uses just a third of its predecessor's parameters and reportedly cost only six percent of what comparable models require to pre-train. That's possible thanks to a "Once-For-All" approach that extracts smaller sub-models from a single training run. On the Search Arena leaderboard, Ernie 5.1 ranks 4th globally, behind two Claude Opus variants and GPT-5.5 Search.
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