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Baidu released ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base

87 points pretext 3 hours ago 38 comments

weijiejason119 3 hours ago | parent

anyone tried this? is it good?

spwa4 2 hours ago | parent

It's not instruction finetuned, so no, it's not good to use for anything like coding agents.

A_D_E_P_T 2 hours ago | parent

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.

input_sh 2 hours ago | parent

They're comparing it to Deepseek-v4-Flash, not 4.1 and not the 4.1 1017 update, so essentially two versions behind the latest version of Deepseek Flash.

Tepix 1 hour ago | parent

DeepSeek 4.1 Flash is twice the size of this and difficult to run locally. Makes more sense to compare it to DS4F.

irthomasthomas 2 hours ago | parent

Qwen3.8-27B has no base model version in the wild that I can see?

speedgoose 1 hour ago | parent

Isn’t the latest Qwen 3 public base model… Qwen 3?

spwa4 2 hours ago | parent

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.

v9v 2 hours ago | parent

I believe they compare to DSv4, not DSv4.1 1017.

wolttam 2 hours ago | parent

Specifically V4-Flash-Base from April.

cubefox 2 hours ago | parent

> Strange to release a model in this state.

No, they explain why they do it.

adrian_b 1 hour ago | parent

Many others, e.g. Google and NVIDIA, have also released such BASE models.

For those with the knowledge and resources needed to finalize the training, BASE models are much more useful than completely trained models.

BASE models are the next best thing after truly open-source LLMs, where you would have access to the complete dataset used for training. Besides the fact that nobody who had used a really big dataset wants to show it, due to possible legal problems, having access to the original dataset would not be helpful for most people, because they would not be able to use it to make an LLM, due to its huge size and due to the vast resources required for pre-training.

On the other hand, continuing training from a BASE model, which is greatly compressed in comparison with the original dataset, is feasible for many.

speedping 2 hours ago | parent

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

NSUserDefaults 2 hours ago | parent

I'd try DONALD for sure, if I wanted to kill a project.

ahoka 2 hours ago | parent

But they didn't give a DONALD.

yehoshuapw 2 hours ago | parent

Make AI Great Again?

selectodude 2 hours ago | parent

SI*

throwaw12 1 hour ago | parent

Trump just realised that he can't use MAGA for Making SI Great Again, probably giving an executive order to reverse SI to AI again, to be able to claim Make AI Great Again

swingboy 1 hour ago | parent

I am PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE that SI will be America’s 51st STATE and will be RENAMED to “American Intelligence”! Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Gigachad 18 minutes ago | parent

Lake Intelligence

locknitpicker 1 hour ago | parent

> I'd try DONALD for sure, if I wanted to kill a project.

The current version is threatening to veto all my prompts.

rob74 1 hour ago | parent

...and when it makes a mistake, it blames anything or anyone else but itself, or insists that what it did is perfect the way it is and that it's still the smartest model in the world?

lofties 2 hours ago | parent

BERT models are still amazing for what they do. Even the latest JEV/KEV/SEV/BEV/REV/TREV models can't beat a well-trained BERT.

throwaw12 1 hour ago | parent

do you have examples of open weight BERT models from hugging face which are trained for specific use cases?

josh-wrale 1 hour ago | parent

Bert and Ernie. Ring a bell? Sesame Street

roryirvine 2 hours ago | parent

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

jojogeo 2 hours ago | parent

For me I see ERNIE as BERT's long time friend and room mate.

How do I look Ernie? ... with your eyes, Bert.

cubefox 2 hours ago | parent

It's a homage to BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), Google's influential 2018 Transformer model that wasn't autoregressive. https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805v2

haunter 2 hours ago | parent

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

swiftcoder 2 hours ago | parent

I think in contemporary parlance this sufficiently clear. Nobody thought massdrop was where you went to buy end-of-life products.

Tepix 1 hour ago | parent

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

karahime 1 hour ago | parent

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

txrx0000 59 minutes ago | parent

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.

stingraycharles 45 minutes ago | parent

So, what exactly can a base model do? Is this like the pre-reasoning models that just autocompleted, without any alignment, reasoning, etc optimizations?

teshier-A 20 minutes ago | parent

I am not sure to follow, why couldn't the vast majority of uses of this base model be nefarious/selfish?

Isn't it like saying "let's give infinite power to all humans on the planet, nothing can go wrong since they define what is humanity" ?

bguberfain 14 minutes ago | parent

Anyone suggest a framework to further train this model on a multi-node cluster with infiniband? NeMo Framework? "Plain" HF TRL+Accelerate? Opinionated suggestions are welcome.