Yi Model
01.AI's bilingual Chinese-English LLM family — high performance, open weights, strong in Asia-Pacific markets.
Overview
Yi is a large language model family developed by 01.AI, a Chinese AI startup founded by Kai-Fu Lee. Released in November 2023, the Yi-6B and Yi-34B models achieved top rankings on the HuggingFace Open LLM Leaderboard for their size class, demonstrating strong reasoning and language capability in both English and Chinese.
The Yi-34B-Chat model scored above GPT-3.5 on several benchmarks and was one of the strongest open models in the 30-40B parameter range at its release. The bilingual capability — maintaining high quality in both English and Chinese — makes Yi particularly valuable for APAC market applications where Chinese language performance is required alongside English.
Yi long-context variants support up to 200K token context windows, enabling processing of very large documents. The models are released under the Yi licence, which permits commercial use for most organisations. 01.AI's backing by Kai-Fu Lee, one of the most prominent figures in Chinese AI, provides credibility and resources for continued development.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 8 May 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
Use cases
ASEAN Perspective
Yi Model in Southeast Asia
ASEAN-region availability and pricing notes coming soon. Drop the editorial team a note via /contact/ if you can supply local context (Singapore/Malaysia/Indonesia/Thailand/Vietnam).
Yi is the LLM family from 01.AI, offered as both open weights and a hosted API, with notably strong bilingual Chinese-English performance and competitive benchmark results that made it one of the more respected open-model lineages. For teams needing solid Chinese-language capability, self-hostable weights, or a cost-effective API alternative to Western models, it is a credible option.
It trails the very top frontier models on the hardest reasoning tasks, and English-centric ecosystems and tooling support are thinner than for OpenAI or Anthropic. Documentation and international billing are improving but China-oriented. ASEAN teams with Chinese-language workloads benefit most; broadly English-only shops have stronger alternatives. Best for bilingual use cases and open-weights deployments.
Notable facts
- 01.AI raised $200 million at a $1 billion valuation in 6 months — one of the fastest unicorn valuations in Chinese AI history.
- Yi-34B was trained on 3 trillion tokens, significantly more than comparable Western models at its release, giving it broader knowledge coverage.
- Kai-Fu Lee, Yi's founder, is the author of 'AI Superpowers', the most widely read book on US-China AI competition.
Frequently asked questions
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including Yi Model's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with Yi Model unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
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