Baidu (BIDU, Financials) introduced two new artificial intelligence models, ERNIE 4.5 and ERNIE X1, making them freely available to individual users ahead of schedule, the company announced Sunday.

With Baidu shares surging 9% on Monday to finish at $102.27 and jumping an additional 2.5% in pre-market trading Tuesday to $104.80 at 8:25 AM EDT, the statement comes amid growing industry competitiveness.

Accessible from ERNIE Bot's official platform are ERNIE 4.5, a native multimodal foundation model, and ERNIE X1, a reasoning model with deep-learning capabilities. Aiming to increase user involvement across its platforms, Baidu intends to combine these models into its larger ecosystem encompassing Baidu Search and the Wenxiaoyan app.Originally set for April 1, the business shifted the free availability date forward. Pricing for ERNIE 4.5 set at RMB 0.004 per 1,000 tokens for input and RMB 0.016 per 1,000 tokens for output, the AI models are also accessible for business users and developers via Baidu AI Cloud's Qianfan platform. ERNIE X1 is slated to arrive shortly with less expensive rates.The business claims ERNIE 4.5 provides advancements in reasoning, coding, and language understanding as well as processing many media including text, photos, audio, and video. To improve its efficiency, Baidu also said the model uses technologies such a heterogeneous multimodal mixed-of- experts system and "FlashMask," dynamic attention masking.Designed for complicated computations, logical reasoning, and powerful search capabilities, ERNIE X1, Baidu's deep-thinking thinking model, Baidu claims it can generate AI-driven photos, read codes, and analyze papers.