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Yi Lightning

01ai/yi-lightning
Language

Speed-first bilingual model: symmetric pricing and sub-second answers for interactive products.

Model overview

Context window

64K

tokens

Input price

quoted on request

Output price

quoted on request

Weekly volume

tokens / week

Open weights

No

API only

Capabilities

3

of 11 tags

Description

Yi Lightning is a language model from 01.AI. Webparam does not stock this model yet and can source it on request — tell us what you need it for and we will come back with availability and a price. 01.AI’s stated focus is efficient bilingual frontier models. The weights are not published, so it is API-only.

Capabilities

Tool calling
Calls functions you define and returns their arguments as structured data, the basis of agents.
JSON mode
Constrains the response to valid JSON matching a schema you supply.
Streaming
Emits tokens as they are generated, so answers appear progressively rather than all at once.

Strengths & weaknesses

Strengths

  • Fastest first token in the catalogue
  • Symmetric in/out pricing
  • Strong EN/ZH balance

Weaknesses

  • 64K context only
  • Depth trails larger models

Pricing

Free
Pricing for Yi Lightning, per 1M tokens
RatePriceUnit
Input$0.00per 1M tokens
Output not charged

Free at the point of use; fair-use rate limits apply to the free tier. Illustrative placeholder pricing.

Context window

64Ktokens

covers prompt and response together, so a long input leaves less room for the answer.

64K tokens against a peer range of 32K to 10M, median 256K. Compared across 24 language models. Logarithmic scale.

Supported features

Feature support for Yi Lightning
FeatureSupport
Tool callingSupported
JSON modeSupported
StreamingSupported
Vision inputNot supported
Audio inputNot supported
Long contextNot supported
Open weightsNot supported
ReasoningNot supported
Fine-tunableNot supported
BatchNot supported
CachingNot supported

Example use cases

  • Chat interfaces

    Fastest first token in the catalogue

  • Autocomplete

    Symmetric in/out pricing

  • Latency-critical features

    Strong EN/ZH balance

Comparison

Yi Lightning compared with Doubao 1.5 Pro and GPT-5.1 Mini
AttributeYi LightningDoubao 1.5 ProGPT-5.1 Mini
Context window64K256K400K
Input price$0.00$0.00$0.00
Output price not charged not charged not charged
Tool callingSupportedSupportedSupported
JSON modeSupportedSupportedSupported
Vision inputNot supportedNot supportedSupported
Open weightsNot supportedNot supportedNot supported
Prompt cachingNot supportedSupportedSupported

Best value in each row is highlighted. Illustrative placeholder data.

Provider information

View 01.AI
01.AI1 models

01.AI · 零一万物 · Beijing, China · est. 2023

AI focused on extracting maximum capability per parameter, its Yi models punched far above their size class in bilingual benchmarks. The lab has since concentrated on the fast, inexpensive Yi-Lightning line for production workloads.

Recent releases

    Documentation

    Frequently asked questions

    Input is billed at $0.00 per 1M tokens, and there is no separate output charge. Every figure on this page is an illustrative placeholder.