# Ernie by Baidu

6 Hacker News commenters recommended Ernie by Baidu and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 4 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Baidu's open weight model family, recommended as one of the good Chinese AI models; critics note answers stay locked on political topics.

## Why people recommend it

- Good Chinese open weight model (3 comments): "DeepSeek, Alibaba/Qwen, Baidu/ERNIE, and Tencent/Hunyuan are breaking that model by releasing various open weight models" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48257560)) "there's many good Chinese models and labs, glm, qwen, deepseek, kimik, mimo, longcat, minimax, hy3, Ernie" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48819264)) "Very good models from China, minimax, ernie, glm, deepseek, mimi, Qwen." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46975556))
- Among top Chinese model labs (2 comments): "there's many good Chinese models and labs, glm, qwen, deepseek, kimik, mimo, longcat, minimax, hy3, Ernie" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48819264)) "Very good models from China, minimax, ernie, glm, deepseek, mimi, Qwen." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46975556))

## What people warn about

- Political topics rigidly restricted (1 comments): "the core political restrictions remained rigidly locked regardless of emotional pressure" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46040811))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Qwen 3.8 27B](https://hackerapproved.com/p/qwen-3-8-27b.md): 1173 recommend
- [Z.ai GLM](https://hackerapproved.com/p/glm-5-2.md): 1043 recommend
- [Kimi](https://hackerapproved.com/p/kimi-k3.md): 931 recommend
- [Gemma 4](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gemma-4.md): 713 recommend
- [Qwen](https://hackerapproved.com/p/qwen.md): 474 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Ernie by Baidu", https://hackerapproved.com/p/ernie/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).