China releases GPT-4.5 rival at 1% the price

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. China’s AI acceleration is back, with tech giant Baidu launching two powerful AI models at just 1% the worth of OpenAI’s GPT-4.5, and half of the worth of DeepSeek’s R1.

With impressive performance claims and radically lower costs, we’re likely witnessing the start of a world AI price competition.

In today’s AI rundown:

• China’s Baidu launches ultra-cheap AI models

• Judge rejects Musk’s bid to dam OpenAI’s evolution

• code with AI, directly in your editor

• Harvard team creates AI agent for personalized medicine

• 4 recent AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

BAIDU

🇨🇳 China’s Baidu launches ultra-cheap AI models

The Rundown: Chinese tech giant Baidu just released two aggressively priced multimodal AI models — ERNIE 4.5, a major upgrade to their foundational model, and a brand new deep-think-capable model called Ernie X1.

The small print:

• ERNIE 4.5 stands out with enhanced “EQ” and language skills in addition to improved hallucination prevention, logical reasoning, and coding abilities.

• In line with Baidu, ERNIE 4.5 outperforms GPT-4.5 across multiple benchmarks while costing just 1% of its price — roughly $0.55 and $2.20 per million input and output tokens.

• ERNIE X1, Baidu’s first reasoning model, matches the capabilities of top Chinese competitor DeepSeek’s R1 at half the worth.

• Like DeepSeek’s R1, ERNIE X1 uses a step-by-step “pondering” approach, excelling in complex calculations and tasks like document understanding.

Why it matters: China continues to construct intelligence too low cost to meter. With ERNIE 4.5 at 1% the price of GPT 4.5, and ERNIE X1 matching DeepSeek’s R1 at half the worth, we’re likely witnessing the beginning of a world AI price competition. This strategy could force Western competitors to slash rates, democratizing access to advanced AI worldwide.

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OPENAI

🧑‍⚖️ Judge rejects Musk’s bid to dam OpenAI’s evolution

The Rundown: A federal judge has denied Elon Musk’s request for a preliminary injunction against OpenAI’s structural changes, while fast-tracking the trial and dismissing several of Musk’s claims entirely, in line with a March 4, 2025 ruling.

The small print:

• The judge said Musk didn’t have “the high burden” for a preliminary injunction but allowed other points of the lawsuit with an expedited trial this fall.

• Internal emails cited by OpenAI allegedly show Musk once desired to merge OpenAI into Tesla as a for-profit entity—contradicting his current legal position.

• Musk sued OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, last yr over straying from their original mission of developing AI for the nice of humanity, not corporate profits.

• OpenAI and Altman have denied the accusations, saying the non-profit isn’t going—and any restructuring of for-profit subsidiaries will only higher support it.

Why it matters: With OpenAI’s rumored ~$40B SoftBank investment hanging on its pivot to a for-profit model, this lawsuit could reshape the corporate’s trajectory and its AI models’ evolution. Having last raised $6.6B at a $157B valuation, the stakes for each the corporate and the broader AI landscape couldn’t be higher.

AI TRAINING

💻 code with AI, directly in your editor

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn to make use of ChatGPT’s updated macOS app and its “Work with Apps” feature to edit code directly in your chosen development environment.

Step-by-step:

1. Install the right extension in your code editor—seek for “openai.chatgpt” within the Extensions marketplace (VS Code/Cursor) or sideload the VSIX file for other editors.

2. Open the ChatGPT app, find the “Work With” panel within the sidebar, and choose your code editor from the list.

3. Open any code file in your editor, and ChatGPT will mechanically connect with it.

4. Ask ChatGPT to clarify sections or modify your code by typing natural language requests, review it, and click on “Apply” to immediately update your file.

Pro tip: Different ChatGPT models offer various levels of code expertise – select based on whether you wish quick edits or complex refactoring.

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🤖 Making AI agents transparent and trustworthy

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On this live webinar, you will discover:

• How AI observability boosts transparency in agent decision-making processes

• Best practices to guard agents from risks using tools like Guardrails

• Essential suggestions for balancing innovation, compliance, and operational security

Register today to attend live or receive the recording afterward.

AI RESEARCH

🧪 Harvard team creates AI agent for personalized medicine

The Rundown: Researchers from Harvard and MIT just introduced TxAgent, an AI agent that leverages multi-step reasoning and real-time biomedical knowledge retrieval to generate trusted, personalized treatment recommendations for patients.

The small print:

• TxAgent utilizes 211 specialized tools to research drug interactions and contraindications and suggest patient-specific treatments in real time.

• It evaluates drugs at molecular, pharmacokinetic, and clinical levels, identifying risks based on comorbidities, ongoing medications, age, and genetic aspects.

• The system synthesizes evidence from biomedical sources, iteratively reasoning and refining recommendations through structured function calls.

• TxAgent’s toolkit is accessible as “ToolUniverse” featuring trusted data sources like openFDA and Open Targets to make sure validated medical insights.

Why it matters: TxAgent signals a significant step in personalized medicine, offering doctors an AI-powered assistant for delivering safer, more tailored treatments. With optimized suggestions, this technique may fast-track medical consultations, especially in developing regions where healthcare systems are already strained.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🚀 OLMo 2 32B – First fully open model that beats GPT-3.5 and GPT-4o mini

• 🎥 Freepik AI Video Upscaler – Upscale low-quality videos to 4K in a single click

• 🧠 Command A – Cohere’s ultra-fast enterprise AI with 256K context window

• 💻 BrowserAgent – Create and run AI workflows in browser with no API costs

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• ✍️ The Rundown – Course Copywriter/Designer

• 📈 Findem – PLG Senior Product Marketing Manager

• 🎨 Sanctuary AI – Technical Artist, Simulation

• ⚡ C3 AI – AI Engagement Director (Energy)

📰 Every little thing else in AI today

Google’s recent Gemini 2.0 Flash model is reportedly getting used by people to remove watermarks from images, including those from platforms like Getty.

Humanoid robot maker Figure announced the launch of BotQ, a brand new manufacturing facility capable of manufacturing 12,000 humanoids a yr—with plans to scale as much as 100,000.

Patronus AI launched the industry’s first multimodal LLM-as-a-judge, a tool designed to assist developers detect and mitigate reliability issues in multimodal AI apps.

Pika Labs released 16 recent effects for its AI video platform, enabling users to morph images into different character videos.

Sesame, which recently went viral for its realistic AI voice tech demo, open-sourced its Conversation Speech Model (CSM-1B) for text-to-speech tasks.

Vogent AI launched voice agents that design and improve themselves, learning from real failure cases and requiring no prompt engineering.

Y Combinator CEO reported that just about 1 / 4 of their current startups now have 95% of their code written by AI, enabling small teams to achieve $10M in revenue with dramatically fewer engineers.

OpenAI’s CPO Kevin Weil just predicted 2025 is the yr AI will permanently surpass humans at programming, calling it a “democratizing effect” that may allow anyone to create software.

COMMUNITY

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Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team