01.AI
Updated May 2026Yi
Open bilingual models from Kai-Fu Lee's 01.AI
Yi made an early mark by releasing strong open bilingual models trained from scratch, with English and Chinese capability, long-context variants, and vision-language branches. It is not the newest hype cycle, but it is still important historically and practically for learners comparing open model lineages.
Variants
4
Best at
English-Chinese bilingual training
Max context
200K
tokens
Pricing
Open weights
$0
per self-hosted model weights
Hosted APIs
varies
per provider
Variants
Sort the table by context window or cost to find the right variant. Click any version below for a battle card with ranks, pricing notes, and official links.
| Modalities | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
Yi-34B-200K 01-ai/Yi-34B-200K | 200K | varies / varies | 2024 | text |
Yi-Large yi-large | 32K | varies / varies | 2024 | text |
Yi-34B-Chat 01-ai/Yi-34B-Chat | 4K | varies / varies | 2024 | text |
Yi-VL 01-ai/Yi-VL | 4K | varies / varies | 2024 | textvision |
Battle card
Context rank
#2
within Yi
Capability rank
#3
modalities + reasoning
Weights
Closed
API/app access
Best fights to pick
- bilingual writing
- chatbots
- creative drafting
Rankings are Tendril directory ranks, computed from the model data shown here. Public benchmark leaderboards change often, so official docs and current benchmark pages should be checked before buying or deploying.
Learn
Lessons about this model
Structured lessons that cover Yi directly or put it in context alongside its rivals.
Yi: Family Map
Yi: Flagship Picker
Yi: Cost And Context
Yi: Reasoning Mode
Yi: Multimodal Workflows
Yi: Coding And Software Tasks
Yi: Agents And Tool Use
Yi: Local Or Private Deployment
Yi: Benchmarks And Reality Checks
Yi: Safety And Limits
Yi: Prompt Recipes
Yi: Industry Use Cases
Yi: Compare Against Rivals
Yi: Build A Mini Workflow
Yi: Capstone Selection Memo
Check yourself
Quizzes
Short, mixed-difficulty quiz sets on Yi and its model family.
Yi Model Family Quiz
5 questions
A short quiz on where Yi fits, which variants matter, and how to choose it responsibly.
Start quiz →Hands-on
Try these prompts
Ready-made prompts that show Yi at its best. Use them in your own AI workspace, then compare the output with what you learned in Tendril.
Yi same-task bakeoff
BuildersCompare Yi against a cheaper and stronger rival on one real task.
Use Yi for this task, then compare with one cheaper model and one stronger model: summarize a 10-page policy document into risks, decisions, owners, and open questions.
Yi failure-mode log
CreatorsTrack where Yi fails instead of only saving the best output.
Run this task three times. For every answer, mark failures as factual error, formatting error, weak reasoning, refusal, or missing citation.
Print & keep
Printable reference
One-page summaries and flowcharts — great for desks, classrooms, or study sessions.
Go deeper
Official resources
Straight from the lab — docs, API references, and the chat surfaces you can try today.
Strengths
- English-Chinese bilingual training
- open-weight educational value
- long-context variants
Limits
- older than today's frontier open models
- short context on common chat releases
- smaller current ecosystem than Qwen or DeepSeek