Baidu released ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base

46 points by pretext 2 hours ago on hackernews | 29 comments

weijiejason119 | 2 hours ago

anyone tried this? is it good?

: spwa4 | an hour ago
It's not instruction finetuned, so no, it's not good to use for anything like coding agents.

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 | an hour ago

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 | 24 minutes ago
DeepSeek 4.1 Flash is twice the size of this and difficult to run locally. Makes more sense to compare it to DS4F.

irthomasthomas | an hour ago

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

: speedgoose | 31 minutes ago
Isn’t the latest Qwen 3 public base model… Qwen 3?

spwa4 | an hour ago

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 | an hour ago

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

: wolttam | an hour ago
Specifically V4-Flash-Base from April.

cubefox | 50 minutes ago

> Strange to release a model in this state.

No, they explain why they do it.

speedping | an hour ago

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

NSUserDefaults | an hour ago

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

ahoka | an hour ago

But they didn't give a DONALD.

yehoshuapw | an hour ago

Make AI Great Again?

selectodude | an hour ago

SI*

throwaw12 | 44 minutes ago

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 | 33 minutes ago
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!

locknitpicker | 44 minutes ago

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

The current version is threatening to veto all my prompts.

: rob74 | 18 minutes ago
...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 | 54 minutes ago

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 | 45 minutes ago
do you have examples of open weight BERT models from hugging face which are trained for specific use cases?

josh-wrale | 43 minutes ago

Bert and Ernie. Ring a bell? Sesame Steeet

roryirvine | an hour ago

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 | 59 minutes ago
For me I see ERNIE as BERT's long time friend and room mate.
How do I look Ernie? ... with your eyes, Bert.
: cubefox | 52 minutes ago
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 | an hour ago

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

Tepix | 25 minutes ago

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