10 Firms Kick Off Monday Leading Gains

4. Baidu Inc. (NASDAQ:BIDU)

Baidu surged by 9.01 percent on Monday to end at $102.27 apiece as investors cheered news that it launched two new Artificial Intelligence models which it claims deliver the same performance as DeepSeek’s at an even lower price.

On Sunday, BIDU introduced the ERNIE X1 and ERNIE 4.5, as the company became the new addition to the heating up AI industry to challenge OpenAI’s ChatGPT and China’s DeepSeek.

“ERNIE X1 delivers performance on par with DeepSeek R1 at only half the price,” the company said, adding that it has “stronger understanding, planning, reflection, and evolution capabilities,” and that it is the first deep thinking model that uses tools autonomously.

Meanwhile, the ERNIE 4.5 has “excellent multimodal understanding ability. It has more advanced language ability, and its understanding, generation, logic, and memory abilities are comprehensively improved.”