What changed
Baidu released ERNIE 5.5 Flash Preview, a 280-billion-parameter mixture model with 14 billion active parameters and a one-million-token context. The API is live on Qianfan; Baidu says Apache-2.0 weights will follow but has not published them yet.
Why it matters
The release adds a long-context Chinese model option for coding, 3D and knowledge work, but separates usable hosted access from a future open-weight promise. Teams should evaluate the API they can call today rather than plan around unreleased files.
What to do
Test a fixed multilingual coding and retrieval set through Qianfan, measure context retention and total serving cost, and wait for an actual repository plus license files before treating the model as open weight.
Caveat
Benchmark and end-to-end agent examples are produced by Baidu. The model is explicitly an intermediate preview, and the announced Apache-2.0 checkpoint was not available at verification time.