HONG KONG, March 16 (Reuters) - China's Baidu 9888.HK said on Sunday it has launched two new artificial intelligence models, the multimodal ERNIE 4.5 and a new reasoning-focused model called X1, as it vies to stand out in a fiercely competitive AI race.

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek's roll-out of AI models which it says is on par with, or even better than, industry-leading models in the United States at a fraction of the cost, has roiled the industry and re-energised the global AI race.

Baidu's ERNIE 4.5 model has "excellent multimodal understanding ability. It has more advanced language ability, and its understanding, generation, logic, and memory abilities are comprehensively improved," the company said.

It also has "high EQ", and it is easy to understand network memes and satirical cartoons, Baidu said.

One of China's earliest tech giants to launch a ChatGPT-style chatbot, Baidu has struggled to gain widespread adoption for its Ernie large language model, despite claiming performance comparable to OpenAI's GPT-4, amid fierce competition.

Multimodal AI systems are capable of processing and integrating various types of data including text, video, images and audio, and can convert content across these formats.

The X1 has "stronger understanding, planning, reflection, and evolution capabilities," Baidu said, adding that it is the first deep thinking model that uses tools autonomously.

(Reporting by Farah Master and the Beijing newsroom; Editing by Lincoln Feast.)

((farah.master@thomsonreuters.com; +852 3462 7709;))