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AI Daily Brief — 16 March 2025

A quieter Sunday — Baidu surfaced its next-generation Ernie line on Chinese soil while Western frontier labs went silent ahead of NVIDIA’s biggest GTC ever. The San Jose Convention Center opened its doors for pre-conference training as Wall Street lined up for Jensen on Tuesday.

Top stories

  • Baidu launches Ernie 4.5 and Ernie X1 reasoning model. Baidu unveiled Ernie 4.5 — its next-generation flagship multimodal model — alongside Ernie X1, a reasoning model targeting DeepSeek-R1 in math and code. Both models slot into Baidu’s Wenxin Yiyan platform, with Baidu claiming Ernie 4.5 surpasses GPT-4.5 on Chinese-language benchmarks at a fraction of the per-token cost. via Reuters
  • NVIDIA GTC 2025 opens with pre-conference workshops. NVIDIA’s annual conference opened at the San Jose Convention Center with full-day training workshops, ahead of the main program (Mar 17-21) and Jensen Huang’s keynote on Tuesday Mar 18. Press previews flagged expected reveals: Blackwell Ultra B300, the Vera Rubin roadmap, automotive partnerships and Isaac GR00T humanoid robotics updates. via Tom’s Hardware

Who shipped

Baidu ran solo on the model-launch side — Ernie 4.5 + X1 represent the Chinese giant’s clearest answer yet to GPT-4o and DeepSeek-R1. Western frontier labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, xAI, Meta) all stayed off official channels.

Open-source pulse

Ernie 4.5 remains API-gated; Baidu has signalled an open-source release for end of June 2025 but kept weights closed for now. No notable open-weights releases dated Mar 16.

Money, infra & hardware

Markets ran up on NVIDIA into the GTC week. Anthropic’s $3.5B Series E at $61.5B post-money continued to anchor coverage of the AI funding climate over the weekend.

Quiet corners

No notable arxiv landmark, funding round, or executive announcement specifically dated Mar 16. Transition day between Cohere Command A (Mar 13) and the GTC announcements (Mar 18+).

By the numbers

  • 2 — Baidu models launched (Ernie 4.5 + Ernie X1)
  • 2 days — until Jensen Huang’s GTC 2025 keynote
  • 25,000 — expected GTC 2025 attendees
  • Most-mentioned company: Baidu

Compiled by AI Feed’s editor from verified web sources for 16 March 2025.