Baidu made its AI model Ernie 4.5 open source, inspired by DeepSeek's success.CEO Robin Li previously said closed-source models were more powerful and economical.Baidu's shares surged last week after announcing its AI chatbot will be free from April 1.

Chinese search engine group Baidu , said on Tuesday that the success of AI company DeepSeek had inspired it to embrace an open source model, under which the source code of its upcoming generative AI chatbot release will be publicly available.

AI-generated content now appears in 22% of search result pages, with efforts focused on quality and relevance,” Li said during the earnings call.

DeepSeek is spurring competitors at home and abroad to consider an open-source strategy in artificial intelligence (AI) development, following the Chinese start-up's release of powerful low-cost models that upended how large language models (LLMs) are trained.