Baidu's ERNIE 5.5 Flash Preview: A 280B Model With Open Weights Promised by 25 November
Photo: Hippopx (public domain). Illustrative image.
What happened. Baidu has unveiled ERNIE 5.5 Flash Preview, its latest foundation model, at Baidu World 2026 in Beijing on 12 November 2026. The headline numbers are 280 billion total parameters with 14 billion active per token, a 1-million-token context window, and an API that is live now on Baidu’s Qianfan cloud platform — free to try on OpenRouter during the preview. Baidu also launched two application models, ERNIE Wizshot Micro-Expression for video and ERNIE Light Deep Thinking, plus a Token Exchange marketplace for buying model services.
The price is the pitch. On Qianfan the API costs RMB 1 per million input tokens and RMB 4 per million output tokens — roughly $0.14 and $0.56 — with cached input at RMB 0.04 per million tokens. That is priced for volume, aimed squarely at developers building agents that make thousands of calls a day. Baidu says the model is optimised with ERNIE Evolve, its proprietary recursive self-improvement technology, and reports competitive scores on Terminal-Bench and AutomationBench — Baidu’s own benchmark claims, with no independent tests yet.
The date to watch is 25 November. Baidu says the model’s weights will be open-sourced before 25 November 2026. That would make it one of the largest open-weight releases of the year, in the same week that Nex-N2.6 arrived as a 321B open-weight agentic model and Thinking Machines put Inkling 2 Small on Hugging Face. But two cautions come with the announcement. First, Baidu itself calls the Preview an intermediate post-training checkpoint and warns some capabilities may be incomplete — the finished version follows later. Second, the licence is not settled: Baidu’s English release page pledges Apache 2.0 for the Preview weights, but the Base checkpoint it is built on carries a custom licence that excludes the EU, UK and South Korea. Until the weights actually land, do not assume an Apache 2.0 licence — check the licence file on the day.
Sources
- Baidu — “Baidu Unveils Latest ERNIE Models Amid Broader Full-Stack AI Lineup, and Debuts Token Exchange to Power Intelligent Organizations” (PR Newswire, 12 November 2026): https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/baidu-unveils-latest-ernie-models-amid-broader-full-stack-ai-lineup-and-debuts-token-exchange-to-power-intelligent-organizations-302937959.html
- Baidu ERNIE — ERNIE 5.5 Flash Preview release page: https://ernie.baidu.com/release/ernie-5-5-flash-preview/
- OpenRouter — ERNIE-5.5-Flash-Preview (free): https://openrouter.ai/baidu/ernie-5.5-flash-preview:free
- FreshSynapse — “Nex-N2.6: A 321B Open-Weight Agentic Model That Claims 83.0 on OSWorld”: https://freshsynapse.com/articles/nex-n2-6-open-weight-agentic-model-2026-11-15/
- FreshSynapse — “Thinking Machines’ Inkling 2 Small Lands as Open Weights”: https://freshsynapse.com/articles/inkling-2-small-open-weights-2026-11-14/
