72
Stack Score
Best for
Best for builders shipping bilingual English/Chinese products who want an open-weight model.
At a glance
- Pricing
- free
- Setup time
- 1 hour
- Learning curve
- steep
- Last verified
- 5/21/2026
What we love
- ✓Open weights with permissive license
- ✓Genuinely good Chinese-language performance
- ✓Multimodal vision variants available
Where it falls short
- −English-only benchmarks lag Llama and Mistral equivalents
- −Less community tooling than Llama or Mistral
- −Self-hosting still requires real ML ops
Pricing
✓ Pricing verified Jun 21, 20262 tiers
Open weights
$0
Apache 2.0
- ✓Yi-6B, Yi-9B, Yi-34B models
- ✓Self-host anywhere
- ✓Commercial use allowed
Yi-Lightning API
From $0.14/M tokens
per token
- ✓Hosted inference
- ✓Function calling
- ✓Multimodal Yi-VL
Why we picked it
Yi is on the short list of credible Chinese-origin open models alongside Qwen and DeepSeek. If your workloads are bilingual English/Chinese, Yi often outperforms Llama on the Chinese half.
Overview
Series of open-weight bilingual (English and Chinese) LLMs from Kai-Fu Lee's 01.AI. Strong on long context (Yi-1.5 supports up to 16K) and competitive on multilingual benchmarks.
Key features
- ●Open-weight series (Yi-6B, Yi-34B, Yi-1.5)
- ●Strong bilingual English + Chinese performance
- ●Long-context variants (up to 200K tokens)
- ●Yi-VL multimodal vision variants
- ●Apache 2.0 license on most variants
- ●Available on Hugging Face, Together, Fireworks
- ●Yi-Lightning hosted API
Best use cases
Ship a bilingual chatbot
Use Yi-34B served on Together to power an English/Chinese support agent.
Run an air-gapped LLM
Self-host Yi-6B on a single GPU for confidential workloads.
Integrations
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