Baidu's Ernie 5.1 uses just a third of its predecessor's parameters and reportedly cost only six percent of what comparable models require to pre-train. That's possible thanks to a "Once-For-All" approach that extracts smaller sub-models from a single training run. On the Search Arena leaderboard, Ernie 5.1 ranks 4th globally, behind two Claude Opus variants and GPT-5.5 Search. The article Baidu's Ernie 5.1 cuts 94 percent of pre-training costs while competing with top models appeared first on The Decoder.