Baidu releases ERNIE 5.5 Flash Preview, an open-weight model for coding and knowledge work

Baidu announced ERNIE 5.5 Flash Preview on X. It calls the model the latest open-weight foundation model in the ERNIE family, built on a new architecture designed for efficient inference, and says it performs better in coding, 3D modeling, knowledge work and content creation and keeps decoding fast. These are Baidu's own claims.

Arena said the model was trending to #2 among open models on Code Arena: WebDev with 1668 points, above DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash (Max) at 1664 and Kimi K3 (Max) at 1658. Arena also said the weights are to be open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license soon.

Earlier this month Baidu published the pretrained base checkpoint ERNIE-5.5-Flash-Base.