Skip to main content
ToolResearchopen-sourceactiveBelow 8
4.8/10Niche
Active

MonthlyFree/open weightsAnnualYi-Lightning historical ~$0.14/MPriceWorldWise custom

Best plan

Free/open weights

Risk: 01

See Yi (01.AI) pricing

Editorial · no paid placements

Should you use it?

Yi is 01.AI's open-weight LLM family. By June 2026 the company is leading with the WorldWise/WanZhi enterprise platform and Super Employee agent story, while Yi-Lightning and Yi open models remain linked from 01.AI, Hugging Face, and GitHub. Pick Yi for frozen-model research, legacy bilingual workloads, or as an entry point to 01.AI's enterprise platform; do not treat it like a current frontier roadmap.

  • Buy ifResearchers using Yi-34B-200K for long-context experiments on fixed weights
  • PickFree/open weights; Yi-Lightning historical ~$0.14/M; WorldWise custom
  • Skip ifProduction workloads needing ongoing Yi model updates

Plan guidance

What to buy

Best planFree/open weights; Yi-Lightning historical ~$0.14/M; WorldWise custom

Watch: 01

Price rangeFree/open weights; Yi-Lightning historical ~$0.14/M; WorldWise custom

Use the official pricing page before purchase because AI plans change often.

Upgrade only ifNot for production workloads needing ongoing yi model updates

01

Fit

Use it for this, skip it for that

Best for

  • Researchers using Yi-34B-200K for long-context experiments on fixed weights
  • Self-hosting bilingual Chinese-English workloads on existing Yi deployments
  • Enterprises evaluating the WorldWise 2.5 multi-agent platform from 01.AI
  • Budget API use where freezing model state is acceptable

Avoid if

  • Production workloads needing ongoing Yi model updates
  • Teams expecting Yi roadmap or benchmark parity with current frontier
  • New deployments where frozen-model risk outweighs cost savings
Watch out
01.AI's public GitHub and model pages remain centered on older Yi-family releases and model-specific license paths. Buyers should verify model-specific license terms and direct API availability before building new production workloads on Yi.

Alternatives

Best swaps

Semantic Scholar

Free AI-powered academic search engine from Ai2 with 234M+ live searchable papers, citation trails, recommendations, datasets, a

Free · 8.8/10Elicit

AI research assistant that automates systematic literature review, paper screening, and structured data extraction from 138M+ ac

$0-$169/user/month · 8.5/10Harvey

Domain-specific AI platform for legal and professional services. Assistant, Vault, Knowledge, Contract Intelligence, Command Cen

Contact sales (reported ~$1,000-$1,200 per lawyer/month) · 8.3/10
Build comparison
Proof and score mathVerified Jun 25

Proof

Why this recommendation is trusted

Evidence01.AI company site
Source
Registered source
Freshness
Review due
Confidence
Low confidence
Verified
Review
Volatility
Volatile

Stale source yi-official.

Editorial score

Unweighted average of 4 axes · confidence high

  • Utility5/10

    How much real work it can do for a competent operator, end to end.

  • Value7/10

    What you get for the dollar relative to the closest alternative.

  • Moat3/10

    How hard it would be for a competitor to replicate the underlying advantage.

  • Longevity4/10

    How likely the product is to still be best-in-class 24 months out.

Verified facts

  1. Best ForResearchers using Yi as a frozen bilingual baseline, teams already running Yi-Coder/Yi-1.5, and enterprises evaluating 01.AI's WorldWise/WanZhi multi-agent platform. 01.AI's June 2026 site still keeps Yi open models discoverable, while English-language WorldWise 2.5 messaging was not consistently visible in the live page text during this refresh.
    mediumDrifts2026-06-2501.AI company site
  2. Pricing AnchorYi weights remain available through 01.AI-linked Hugging Face and GitHub paths. Official June 2026 pages do not expose a current direct Yi-Lightning API price; the ~$0.14/M token figure is historical, third-party gateway prices vary, and WorldWise/WanZhi enterprise pricing is custom.
    mediumVolatile2026-06-25Hugging Face 01-ai
  3. Watch Out For01.AI's public GitHub and model pages remain centered on older Yi-family releases and model-specific license paths. Buyers should verify model-specific license terms and direct API availability before building new production workloads on Yi.
    mediumVolatile2026-06-2501.AI company site
Open SourceDormant
01-ai/Yi
7,821stars
488forks
Jupyter Notebooklanguage
Apache-2.0license
1 year agolast commit
View on GitHub
Full review notesLong-form details, FAQ, and source history

01.AI’s open-weight LLM family, developed in Beijing by Kai-Fu Lee’s lab starting March 2023. 01.AI achieved unicorn status within eight months and released Yi-34B, Yi-Lightning, and Yi-Coder across 2023 and 2024. Yi-Lightning briefly ranked joint third on Chatbot Arena at its October 2024 launch.

Status as of June 2026: maintenance Yi, active company uncertain from public English pages. 01.AI’s public model page still keeps Yi open model variants listed, but the public GitHub news stream remains centered on 2024 Yi releases. During the June 25 refresh, AiPedia could verify Yi model availability on 01.AI, Hugging Face, and GitHub, but not a fresh Yi-2 roadmap or a current first-party Yi API price. Treat WorldWise/WanZhi claims as sales-led or region-rendered unless the buyer has current 01.AI materials.

System Verdict

Pick Yi for narrow legacy use cases or as the on-ramp to 01.AI sales conversations. Yi-34B-200K still works as a fixed baseline for research. Yi-Coder and Yi-1.5 remain available through public model paths for teams that have already integrated them. Yi-Lightning’s official direct pricing is no longer surfaced on the June 2026 pages AiPedia checked, so treat the old ~$0.14/M-token figure as historical unless a gateway quote confirms it.

Skip it for new frontier production. The family receives no major pre-training updates. DeepSeek delivers what Yi-Lightning promised with an active roadmap. Qwen offers a broader open-weight family under Apache 2.0 with monthly releases. Kimi K2.6 lands the open-weight agentic baseline that 01.AI has stepped back from.

Who still uses Yi: Academic researchers freezing a fixed baseline, hobbyists running Yi-34B-200K on existing infrastructure, teams with pre-existing Yi-Coder deployments, and enterprises buying WorldWise 2.5 from 01.AI’s go-to-market team.

Key Facts
StatusYi family in maintenance since the March 2025 pre-training pause
Current focus of 01.AIEnterprise AI platform and applications; exact WorldWise/WanZhi availability should be verified through current 01.AI sales materials
Highest-performing Yi modelYi-Lightning (October 2024)
Flagship open-weightYi-34B-200K (4K base, 200K extended context)
Coding modelsYi-Coder-9B and Yi-Coder-1.5B public model paths
Enterprise platformWorldWise/WanZhi materials have appeared in prior 2026 checks, but live public English-page confirmation was constrained during the June 25 refresh
Yi-Lightning pricingHistorical ~$0.14/M input and output; no current direct 01.AI price surfaced in June 2026 source check
Third-party accessOpenRouter, AIMLAPI, other aggregators
License postureGitHub now shows Apache-2.0 license files for Yi-1.5; 01.AI site still routes commercial-license applications, so confirm model-specific terms
No Yi-2 announcedPublic 01.AI and GitHub pages do not show a new Yi-2 release

Every data point above was verified on 2026-06-25. See Sources.

What it actually is

availability and current first-party token pricing were not surfaced in the June 10 source check. 01.AI itself spends its 2026 product energy on the WorldWise/WanZhi multi-agent enterprise platform.

The original Yi product delivered strong results. Yi-34B beat Llama 2 at launch. Yi-Lightning ranked competitively on Chatbot Arena at $0.14/M tokens, one of the best price-per-quality ratios of its era. Yi-Coder is a capable open coding model under Apache 2.0.

The strategic story has shifted twice. In March 2025 Kai-Fu Lee publicly argued that pre-training below hundred-million-user scale is uneconomic, and 01.AI moved consulting workloads onto DeepSeek-backed agent stacks. In 2026 the company packaged that pivot into WorldWise/WanZhi 2.5, a multi-agent enterprise platform sold directly by 01.AI’s go-to-market organization. Yi sits beside that platform as a legacy artifact and an open-weight calling card.

When to pick Yi

  • Fixed-weight research baselines. Academic papers benefit from models that will not change. Yi-34B-200K gives a citable frozen target.
  • Long-context experiments on older hardware. Yi-34B-200K runs on a single A100 and handles 200K tokens for research prototypes.
  • Legacy Yi-Coder deployments. Teams already using Yi-Coder-9B or Yi-Coder-1.5B can continue running those models, but should confirm model-specific license text before commercial redistribution.
  • Bilingual Chinese-English tasks with fixed scope. Yi’s training still handles both languages competently for narrow-scope workloads.
  • WorldWise/WanZhi 2.5 enterprise evaluation. Buyers exploring 01.AI’s multi-agent enterprise platform get Yi positioning as part of the package.
  • Budget API through third-party gateways. Yi-Lightning may remain available through aggregators, but price and SLA need provider-level confirmation.

When to pick something else

  • Active open-weight development: Qwen releases monthly under Apache 2.0 across 119 languages.
  • Cheapest capable API with a roadmap: DeepSeek delivers Yi-Lightning’s value proposition with ongoing model updates.
  • Polished English product: ChatGPT or Claude.
  • Open-weight coding leader: GLM GLM-5.1 under MIT at SWE-Bench Pro leader tier.
  • Open-weight agentic baseline: Kimi K2.6 Agent Swarm leads the open-weight agentic category that 01.AI has stepped away from.
  • Long-context frontier model: Claude Opus 4.8 at 1M tokens, or Kimi K2.6 at 256K.

Pricing

Yi-Lightning pricing depends on third-party aggregators unless 01.AI sales confirms a direct route. Yi weights remain linked through Hugging Face 01-ai and GitHub. WorldWise/WanZhi enterprise pricing is quoted directly by 01.AI.

SurfacePriceNotes
Yi open weightsFree to download where hostedConfirm model-specific license; GitHub lists Apache-2.0 files for Yi-1.5 while 01.AI still routes commercial-license applications
Yi-Coder-9B / 1.5BFree where hostedConfirm model-specific license before commercial redistribution
Yi-Lightning (direct, historical)~$0.14/M input and outputHistorical October 2024 figure; current direct 01.AI pricing not surfaced in June 2026 official pages
Yi-Lightning (third-party gateways)VariesOpenRouter, AIMLAPI, other aggregators
WorldWise/WanZhi 2.5 enterprise platformCustomMulti-agent platform; CEO-led sales motion in 2026

Prices verified 2026-06-25 via 01.AI company site, 01.AI Yi models, Hugging Face 01-ai, Yi GitHub, and SCMP coverage of 01.AI’s enterprise pivot. Direct 01.AI API access post-pivot remains uncertain; third-party gateways are the practical path for Yi-Lightning unless sales confirms otherwise, while WorldWise/WanZhi claims should be confirmed through current sales materials.

Against the alternatives

Yi (frozen)DeepSeek V3Qwen3 open-weightGLM-5.1
Active developmentNo (WorldWise platform active)YesYes (monthly)Yes
Open weightsModel-specific; verify current license filesV3 openApache 2.0MIT
Current benchmarksFrozen at 2024 levelFrontier reasoningFrontier multilingualSWE-Bench Pro leader
API price~$0.14/M (third-party)~$0.28/M~$0.15-$0.325/M$1.00/M
Context window200K (Yi-34B-200K)64K1M (Qwen3.6 Plus)200K
Vendor roadmapNone for new Yi; WorldWise 2.5 activeActiveActiveActive
Best viewed asLegacy research baseline plus WorldWise on-rampCheap capable APIOpen-weight multilingualOpen-weight coding leader

Failure modes
  • No visible Yi-2 roadmap. The June 2026 official pages checked by AiPedia still position WorldWise/WanZhi rather than a new Yi generation, and GitHub’s visible news remains 2024-centered.
  • Yi-Lightning API availability is uncertain. Direct 01.AI hosted access post-pivot is ambiguous. Third-party gateways remain the practical path, but per-provider SLAs vary.
  • License ambiguity by model. GitHub shows Apache-2.0 files for Yi-1.5, while 01.AI’s official model page still routes commercial-license applications. Treat commercial deployment as model-specific legal review, not a blanket green light.
  • Community support is less active than current frontier alternatives. The public repo remains useful, but it does not show the same 2026 release cadence as Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi, or GLM.
  • Enterprise path flows through WorldWise/WanZhi. 01.AI’s WorldWise/WanZhi 2.5 platform is the company’s go-to-market headline. Customers buying from 01.AI are mostly buying the agent platform, with Yi as a brand asset rather than the underlying frontier model.
  • Benchmark drift. Yi-Lightning’s late-2024 Chatbot Arena ranking does not reflect 2026 frontier scores. DeepSeek V3, Qwen3, GLM-5.1, and Kimi K2.6 have all surpassed it.
  • Same Chinese-provider data residency posture as active vendors. Without the benefit of an active Yi roadmap to justify the tradeoff.

Methodology

This page was produced by the aipedia.wiki editorial pipeline, an automated system that ingests vendor documentation, verifies pricing and model details against primary sources, and generates the editorial analysis you are reading. No individual human wrote this review. Scoring follows the four-dimension rubric at /about/scoring/ (Utility, Value, Moat, Longevity; unweighted average). Longevity is scored low to reflect the frozen-model status of the Yi family, even though 01.AI as a company remains operational. Last verified 2026-06-25 against 01.AI company site, 01.AI Yi models, Lingyiwanwu/WanZhi site, SCMP interview with Kai-Fu Lee, Hugging Face 01-ai, and Yi GitHub.

FAQ

Is 01.AI still developing Yi? The public June 2026 pages AiPedia checked keep Yi-Lightning and Yi open models listed, but 01.AI’s active product energy goes into WorldWise/WanZhi 2.5, an enterprise multi-agent platform. No Yi-2 is announced on the official site or GitHub page.

Is Yi open source? Mixed enough to require model-specific review. GitHub now shows Apache-2.0 license files and says Yi-1.5 code and weights use Apache 2.0, while 01.AI’s official model page still routes commercial-license applications. Check the exact checkpoint license before commercial deployment.

How does Yi-Lightning compare in 2026? At its October 2024 launch, Yi-Lightning ranked joint third on Chatbot Arena at a historical ~$0.14/M-token price. Since then, active model families such as DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, and Kimi have moved faster. 01.AI still labels Yi-Lightning “Global SOTA MoE era.

Should I start a new project on Yi? Only if you specifically need a frozen-weight research baseline or already have Yi-Coder integrated. For new production work, DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, and Kimi offer active roadmaps at similar or better price points.

What is WorldWise? 01.AI’s enterprise LLM platform, now at version 2.5. The English site calls it WorldWise; the Chinese site brands the platform as WanZhi. It packages multi-agent “Super Employee” deployments for business customers and is the headline product on 01.AI’s 2026 corporate site.

Sources

Review History

  • 2026-06-25: Re-verified 01.AI company site, Yi model page, Hugging Face organization, GitHub license/release-news posture, and direct-pricing uncertainty. Softened WorldWise/WanZhi 2.5 claims where the live public English pages were region-rendered or not consistently visible.
ShareLinkedIn
Was this review helpful?
Embed this score on your siteFree. Links back.
Yi (01.AI) editorial score badge
<a href="https://aipedia.wiki/tools/yi/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img src="https://aipedia.wiki/badges/yi.svg" alt="Yi (01.AI) on aipedia.wiki" width="260" height="72" /></a>
[![Yi (01.AI) on aipedia.wiki](https://aipedia.wiki/badges/yi.svg)](https://aipedia.wiki/tools/yi/)

Badge value auto-updates if the editorial score changes. Attribution via the link is required.

Cite this pageFor journalists, researchers, and bloggers
According to aipedia.wiki Editorial at aipedia.wiki (https://aipedia.wiki/tools/yi/)
aipedia.wiki Editorial. (2026). Yi (01.AI): Editorial Review. aipedia.wiki. Retrieved August 3, 2026, from https://aipedia.wiki/tools/yi/
aipedia.wiki Editorial. "Yi (01.AI): Editorial Review." aipedia.wiki, 2026, https://aipedia.wiki/tools/yi/. Accessed August 3, 2026.
aipedia.wiki Editorial. 2026. "Yi (01.AI): Editorial Review." aipedia.wiki. https://aipedia.wiki/tools/yi/.
@misc{yi-01-ai-editorial-review-2026, author = {{aipedia.wiki Editorial}}, title = {Yi (01.AI): Editorial Review}, year = {2026}, publisher = {aipedia.wiki}, url = {https://aipedia.wiki/tools/yi/}, note = {Accessed: 2026-08-02} }
Spotted an error or want to share your experience with Yi (01.AI)?

Every tool page is re-verified on a recurring cycle, and corrections land faster when readers flag them directly. If you spot a stale fact, a missing capability, or have used Yi (01.AI) and want to share what worked or didn't, the editorial desk reviews every message sent through this form.

Email editorial@aipedia.wiki
Report outdated infoHelp us keep this page accurate