Baidu Releases Open-Source Multimodal AI That It Claims Beats GPT-5 and Gemini

It really hasn't. It's the opposite, actually. The latest breakthroughs in RL by the big4 labs haven't been replicated yet in any open model (including the latest k2-thinking). Even gemini-2.5 still delivers on generalisation in a way that no open models do, today (almost a year later). The general consensus was that "open" models were 6-8 months behind SotA, but with the RL stuff we can see they've moved further away.

I don't know what exactly it is, if it's simply RL scale, or data + scale, or better secret sauce (rewards, masking, something else) but the way these new models generalise is leagues ahead of open models, sadly.

Don't be fooled by benchmarks alone. You have to test them on problems that you own and you can be fairly sure no one is targeting for benchmark scores. Recently there was a python golfing competition on kaggle, and I tested some models on that task. While the top4 models were chugging along, in both agentic and 0shot regimes, the open models (coding specific or, older "thinking" models) were really bad at the task. 480b models, coding specific, would go in circles, get lost on one example, and so on. Night and day between the open models and gpt5/claude/gemini2.5. Even grok fast solved a lot of tasks in agentic mode.