Baidu released ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base

Brilliant! Base model releases are exactly what we need right now. This is the reliable way to do alignment. Releasing the base model then letting everyone on the planet do whatever they want with it is probably what ends up preventing extreme value drift through the intelligence explosion. Millions of people would try to align these base models in their own way, and we'll probably all fail, but those models would drift in different directions so their actions cancel eachother out in the real world. The end result is alignment to humanity's average objective function, at the civilization level. It's a messy but very surefire way to align.

There will still be a different kind of value drift from increasing intelligence itself, but that's unavoidable no matter what we do. Releasing open models slows that down too because it discourages investment in future training runs. And this strategy works unilaterally without cooperation - every open model release slows it down by a little bit. This is the actual way to pace the frontier unlike the regulatory capture stunts Anthropic and OpenAI are attempting while pontificating about their moral superiority.

Absolutely glad to see the release of a base model, I think the trend away from that has been an issue for the field.

ERNIE feels old, like BERT. They either need a rebrand or fully embrace retro-dawn-of-ML vibes

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.

That's an interesting size, it will fit into 2x128GB at decent (≥4bpw) quantization.

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

anyone tried this? is it good?

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

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.