Baidu ERNIE 5.1 Preview Reaches #1 Among Chinese Models on LMArena, #13 Globally

Baidu ERNIE Blog·medium signal

Baidu's ERNIE 5.1 Preview scored 1,476 on LMArena's Text Arena on April 30, ranking #13 globally and #1 among all Chinese AI models — beating DeepSeek-V4-Pro. Also ranked #1 worldwide in Legal & Government category. Uses roughly 1/3 the parameters of ERNIE 5.0 and costs only ~6% to train. For context, overall top positions: Claude Opus 4.7 Thinking at 1,503 and Gemini 3.1 Pro at 1,493. Demonstrates Chinese labs competing on efficiency, not just scale.