AI Model Comparison
Side-by-side comparison of pricing, context window, benchmarks, capabilities, and license. Every figure comes from the developer's own pages, last checked on ; each model's page lists its sources. A figure we could not source shows as a dash.
Model A — Baidu
ERNIE 5.1 is Baidu's latest ERNIE model, derived from ERNIE 5.0 with total parameters cut to about one-third and active parameters to about one-half; Baidu says it took about 6% of the pre-training cost of comparable models. It is served through Baidu's Qianfan platform with a 128k context.
Model B — NVIDIA
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is a 30B-parameter (3B active) open-weight language model from NVIDIA, released on August 11, 2026 with a hybrid Mamba-2 and mixture-of-experts architecture. NVIDIA says it supports up to 1M tokens of context and is ready for commercial use.
| Property | ERNIE 5.1 | NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| Released | May 9, 2026 | Aug 11, 2026 |
| Developer | Baidu | NVIDIA |
| Type | llm | llm |
| License | proprietary | open-weight |
| Context window | — | — |
| Parameters | — | 30B total, 3B active (Mamba-2 + MoE + attention hybrid) |
| Developer status | — | — |
| Input $/M tokens | — | — |
| Output $/M tokens | — | — |
Bold green values indicate the winner on that dimension where comparison is meaningful (lower price wins; bigger context wins; more open license wins; newer date wins). Prices are the ones each developer lists today; a model it no longer prices has none.
Programmatic access available at /api/ai/compare?a=ernie-5-1&b=nemotron-3-5-lightning. CORS is open. Citation guidance: /about/editorial-process.