Writes through with details of launch

BEIJING, Feb 14 (Reuters) - Chinese search engine giant Baidu 9888.HK said on Friday it would make its next-generation artificial intelligence model Ernie open-source from June 30, a major shift in strategy as competition heats up.

Baidu CEO Robin Li had long advocated for closed-source models as the only viable path for AI development, but the advent of DeepSeek has upended the sector. The startup offers open-source AI services that it claims are comparable in performance to U.S. pioneer OpenAI's advanced systems but come with a lower operational cost.

Keen to increase market share, Baidu also announced on Thursday that it would make its AI chatbot Ernie Bot free starting April 1, about a year and a half after introducing premium versions.

Baidu was among the first big Chinese companies to invest heavily in AI following the 2022 debut of OpenAI's ChatGPT. However, its Ernie large language model has struggled to gain widespread adoption. Baidu has said its current version, Ernie 4.0, matches OpenAI's GPT-4 capabilities.

In China, ByteDance's Doubao chatbot has the most active monthly users with 78.6 million, DeepSeek has 33.7 million while Ernie Bot has 13 million, according to January data from AI product tracker Aicpb.com.

"We will gradually launch the Ernie 4.5 series in the coming months and officially open-source it from June 30," Baidu said in a WeChat post.

Li appeared to have changed tack on open-source development, telling attendees at an event in Dubai this week that it could accelerate AI adoption.

"If you open things up, a lot of people will be curious enough to try it. This will help spread the technology much faster," he said.

Baidu also plans to launch a new next-generation model, Ernie 5, in the second half of 2025, a person familiar with the matter has said.

(Reporting by Liam Mo and Brenda Goh; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)

((qiaoyi.li@thomsonreuters.com;))