Baidu’s ERNIE Evolve Automated Research System Beats NanoChat and NanoGPT Records

Baidu released ERNIE Evolve, an automated research system that selects research directions, edits code and runs experiments against a fixed objective, keeping only changes that pass a hidden evaluator and a separate reviewer. It beat the best public result on 3 of 4 public metrics, including 0.8763 validation BPB on NanoChat AutoResearch, 38.9 s on NanoGPT Speedrun Track 1 and 2,590 steps on Track 3, while scoring 0.819 mean SOL on SOL-ExecBench, behind the 0.827 leaderboard best. On ERNIE-5.5-Flash inference it reported 623.6% of baseline generation speed on Kunlunxin P800, +33.7% deterministic throughput and +14.9% single-request decode speed, though the system itself is not released.