Baidu’s ERNIE Team announced ERNIE-5.5-Flash-Base on November 5, 2026, releasing downloadable weights for a text-only mixture-of-experts model with 280 billion total parameters and 14 billion activated per token. The checkpoint ends pre-training, before mid-training or post-training, giving developers a common starting point for domain adaptation, instruction tuning and reinforcement-learning research. The release also provides a fixed baseline for controlled comparisons of training methods…