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- China's Baidu Releases New AI Model to Compete With DeepSeek
China's Baidu Releases New AI Model to Compete With DeepSeek
How to easily edit images using only text with Gemini.
Gina Acosta
March 17, 2025
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Welcome to another edition of Horizon AI,
The Chinese tech giant is releasing two new models that deliver performance on par with the best models while being considerably cheaper.
Let’s jump into it!
Read Time: 4.5 min
Here's what's new today in the Horizon AI
China’s Baidu Launches Two New AI Models
Roblox Launches Open-Source AI Model “Cube” for Creating 3D Objects
AI Tutorial: How to easily edit images using only text with Gemini.
AI Tools to check out
The Latest in AI and Tech 💡
AI Findings/Resources
AI News
BAIDU
China’s Baidu Launches Two New AI Models
Baidu has announced the release of two new AI models—Ernie 4.5, the latest version of the company’s foundational model, and Ernie X1, a new reasoning model.
Details:
Baidu claims that Ernie X1 delivers performance "on par with DeepSeek R1 at only half the price" and highlights Ernie 4.5's "high EQ," which allows the model to understand memes and satire.
The model reportedly outperforms OpenAI's GPT-4.5 in multiple benchmarks while costing only 1% of the price to use GPT-4.5.
Both models have multimodal capabilities allowing them to process text, images, audio, and video,
Baidu also plans to release its next-generation model, Ernie 5, later this year with further multimodal improvements.
Baidu was one of China’s first tech giants to launch a ChatGPT-style chatbot. However, its early Ernie LLM struggled to gain widespread adoption, especially outside China. Now, the company hopes to replicate DeepSeek's success.
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ROBLOX
Roblox Launches Open-Source AI Model “Cube” for Creating 3D Objects
Roblox has released the first iteration of its 3D model called “Cube.” It allows creators to generate 3D objects with the help of generative AI.
Details:
The first tool in Cube, mesh generation, enables creators to generate 3D objects (or “meshes”) using a single text prompt, such as “a red sports car with white stripes.”
Roblox also announced three upcoming AI tools—text generation, text-to-speech, and speech-to-text. These tools will let developers add features like NPC conversations, voice commands, and spoken narration to games.
The company released an open-source version, allowing anyone outside the platform to build on it. Developers can customize the model, create plug-ins, or train it with their own datasets to meet specific needs.
The company had already released several AI tools, and it's not the only one—AI in gaming is becoming a hot topic, and many companies have recently made advancements in this space.
AI Tutorial
How to easily edit images using only text with Gemini
Gemini is great at removing watermarks.
Google recently introduced new capabilities for Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental.
Now it lets you edit images with natural language, render text better, keeps consistent characters and create visual stories with native image generation—all for free.
Go to Google AI Studio
Change your Model to Gemini 2.0 Flash (Image Generation) Experimental
Upload your image and give a text prompt
This opens up many possibilities that were previously only available to those with knowledge of tools like Photoshop. Now, you can just ask Gemini to do it instantly. Some examples:
Add, swap, or change objects in your image. It is also great at removing watermarks, as shown in the images above—a capability that has sparked some controversy.
Change expressions, clothes, or hairstyles, and even switch to a back or side view or zoom out. Gemini is great at keeping characters consistent.
Add color to black-and-white images or add/change backgrounds in your images.
AI Tools to check out
🔥 Zinc: Power your agents with high-quality retail data and ordering automation.
👉 Gum.new: A platform for creating and sharing conversion-optimized landing pages.
✨ Meshy: AI 3D toolkit that enables users to effortlessly transform text or 2D images into 3D assets.
⭐ DreamRP: Bring your characters to life with ethical AI.
AI Findings/Resources
👉 6 NotebookLM tips I use to stay productive
💡 Model Context Protocol (MCP) explained in 20 minutes
🤔 How AI agents are helping startups to scale
The latest in AI and Tech
OpenAI’s Chief Product Officer responded to Anthropic's prediction that coding automation would take until 2027 to become a reality, predicting that AI will take over competitive coding for good in 2025.
The company’s new evaluation technology will help developers detect and mitigate hallucinations and reliability issues in multimodal AI applications.
The company is integrating its HD voice model, Chirp 3, into the Vertex AI platform, expanding its capabilities with 8 new voices across 31 languages.
Notepad's new AI-powered feature allows users to generate concise summaries of their notes instantly. The Snipping Tool is also gaining a 'draw & hold' feature, enabling users to draw straight lines and shapes more easily.
That’s a wrap!
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Gina 👩🏻💻