Yi-Lightning.
01.AI's fastest production model. Tops the LMSYS Arena Chinese leaderboard.
Cheapest hosted endpoints.
Variants in the Yi family.
Frequently asked.
How do I run Yi-Lightning?
Where can I access Yi-Lightning?
How much does it cost to run Yi-Lightning?
Is Yi-Lightning open-source or proprietary?
What it costs per month across providers.
Estimate your monthly bill for Yi-Lightning across every host that publishes per-token pricing. Slide your token volumes; the chart + table re-rank cheapest-first.
Cheapest provider on the left.
Total monthly cost — input + output tokens combined.
Bill breakdown.
About Yi-Lightning.
Yi-Lightning is 01.AI's flagship closed model, launched October 2024. It hit the top of the LMSYS Chatbot Arena Chinese leaderboard within weeks of release and placed competitively in the global ranking — proof that a much smaller Chinese lab can compete with the frontier labs on quality. Closed model accessed via the 01.AI platform. Earlier Yi releases (Yi-34B, Yi-1.5) remain open-weight on Hugging Face for self-hosting.