Baidu ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-Thinking: Revolutionizing AI Reasoning with Compact MoE Efficiency

Baidu ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-Thinking: The Compact MoE Model Redefining AI Reasoning in 2025 Keywords: ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-Thinking, Baidu AI, MoE model, deep reasoning, long-context LLM, tool-calling, Apache-2.0, Hugging Face, 128K context, mixture-of-experts, efficient AI inference TL;DR (≤100 words) Baidu’s new 21-billion-parameter MoE model activates only 3 B per token, natively handles 128 K context and tool calls, and matches larger dense models on STEM benchmarks—all under the permissive Apache-2.0 license. 1. Why Another Reasoning Model? OpenAI’s o3, Anthropic’s Claude 4 and DeepSeek-R1 have proven that scale boosts accuracy—yet also explode GPU budgets and carbon footprints. Enterprises want lab-grade logic without data-center-sized bills. Enter ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-Thinking: …