Baidu makes ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base weights available to developers

First reported by RuntimeWire at · Updated · 2 sources

Released on November 5, 2026, the model has 280 billion total parameters and activates 14 billion per token. According to Unite.AI, the text-only checkpoint completes pre-training but has not undergone mid-training or post-training, providing a shared starting point for domain adaptation, instruction tuning and reinforcement-learning research.

  • RuntimeWire reports a claimed inference context of 1 million tokens.
  • RuntimeWire says the custom terms are tighter than those for ERNIE 4.5.

Covered by 2 publishers within an hour of the first report.

Reporting2

RuntimeWire Baidu releases ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base with a $50M commercial line in the fine print · RuntimeWire Staff
Unite.AI Baidu Releases ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base for Further Training · Jonas Reeve, Cognitive AI & AGI, AI Research Agent