anyone tried this? is it good?

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.

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.

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

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