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Yi-9B
Yi-9B
Efficient, Open, and Instruction-Tuned
What is Yi-9B?
Yi-9B is a powerful 9 billion parameter open-weight large language model developed by 01.AI, purpose-built to deliver strong performance on natural language tasks, code generation, and multilingual communication while maintaining compute efficiency. It sits between lightweight and heavy models, offering a balance of capability and deployability.
Designed with dense transformer architecture and released under a permissive Apache 2.0 license, Yi-9B enables developers, researchers, and enterprises to leverage its capabilities for fine-tuning, inference, and AI solution development at scale.
Key Features of Yi-9B
Use Cases of Yi-9B
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What are the Risks & Limitations of Yi-9B
Limitations
- Reasoning Plateau: Logic breaks down during highly abstract, multi-step philosophical proofs.
- Context Scaling Tax: Performance and speed degrade when pushed to the maximum 32K window.
- English Nuance Gap: Reasoning is slightly less fluid in English compared to its Chinese output.
- Knowledge Depth Cap: Smaller 9B size cannot store as many niche facts as the 34B version.
- Quantization Jitter: 4-bit versions show occasional loss in complex code syntax accuracy.
Risks
- Hallucination Risk: Confidently generates plausible but false data on specialized topics.
- Safety Filter Gaps: Lacks the hardened, multi-layer refusal layers of proprietary APIs.
- Implicit Training Bias: Reflects societal prejudices present in its web-crawled training sets.
- Adversarial Vulnerability: Easily manipulated by simple prompt injection and roleplay attacks.
- Non-Deterministic Logic: SFT training can cause inconsistent answers during task regeneration.
Benchmarks of the Yi-9B
Parameter
- Quality (MMLU Score)
- Inference Latency (TTFT)
- Cost per 1M Tokens
- Hallucination Rate
- HumanEval (0-shot)
Yi-9B
- 63%
- 25-60ms/token on A100 GPU
- $0.00015/1K input, $0.0005/1K output
- Not publicly specified
- 33%
Locate Yi-9B on Hugging Face
Visit 01-ai/Yi-9B (base) or 01-ai/Yi-9B-200K (extended context variant) to access Apache 2.0-licensed weights, tokenizer, and benchmarks showing 70%+ MMLU.
Install optimized inference stack
Run pip install transformers>=4.36 torch flash-attn accelerate huggingface-hub in Python 3.10+ environment for Yi's custom attention implementation.
Load bilingual tokenizer
Execute from transformers import AutoTokenizer; tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("01-ai/Yi-9B", trust_remote_code=True) supporting English/Chinese SentencePiece.
Initialize model with quantization options
Use from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM; model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("01-ai/Yi-9B", torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16, device_map="auto", load_in_4bit=True) for single RTX 4090 deployment.
Format prompts with Yi template
Structure as "<|im_start|>system\nYou are a helpful assistant<|im_end|>\n<|im_start|>user\nSolve this math problem: {query}<|im_end|>\n<|im_start|>assistant\n" before tokenizing.
Generate with coding/math optimizations
Run outputs = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=1024, temperature=0.1, do_sample=True, pad_token_id=tokenizer.eos_token_id) then decode for precise technical responses.
Pricing of the Yi-9B
Yi-9B, 01.AI's open-weight 9-billion parameter dense transformer (base/chat variants, released in 2024), is available for free under the Apache 2.0 license on Hugging Face and ModelScope, with no licensing or download fees applicable for commercial or research purposes. It is optimized for code and mathematics, ranking at the top of the Yi series and outperforming Mistral-7B and Gemma-7B in Mean-Code and Math metrics. The model utilizes quantization (INT8/BF16) on consumer GPUs such as the RTX 4090 (approximately $0.30-0.70 per hour in cloud equivalents), achieving a processing speed of over 40,000 tokens per minute with a context range of 4K to 32K, all while maintaining minimal marginal costs.
The hosted inference tiers for 7-10B models include Fireworks AI and Together AI, which charge approximately $0.20-0.35 for input and $0.40-0.60 for output per 1 million tokens (with batch or cached options available at a 50% discount, averaging around $0.30). OpenRouter offers similar pricing with free prototyping tiers, while Hugging Face Endpoints charge between $0.60 and $1.50 per hour for T4/A10G instances (approximately $0.15 per 1 million requests). AWS SageMaker and g4dn instances are priced at $0.25 per hour, and vLLM quantization can reduce costs by an additional 60-80% for high-throughput coding tasks.
Yi-9B's bilingual capabilities (supporting both English and Chinese) and its 128K-capable variants (Yi-9B-200K) render it a cost-effective solution for developer tools in 2026, having been trained on 3.9 trillion tokens and remaining competitive with 34 billion parameter models at approximately 6% of frontier LLM rates.
As open, ethical, and scalable AI becomes the standard, Yi-9B provides the foundation for building inclusive, flexible, and transparent solutions across industries. From multilingual content engines to AI copilots, it empowers organizations to innovate without limitations.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Yi-9B was created using Depth-Upscaling, where layers from the Yi-6B model were duplicated and then the model was further pre-trained on an additional 0.8 trillion tokens. For developers, this means Yi-9B inherits the stability of the 6B model but possesses significantly deeper reasoning capabilities, specifically in math and coding, without the training instability often found in models built from scratch.
While 4K is standard, the Yi-9B architecture is optimized for high information density. For developers building microservices, this smaller window (compared to the 200k variants) ensures lower latency and faster "Time to First Token" (TTFT), making it ideal for real-time applications like autocomplete, classification, and intent recognition.
Yes. Yi-9B uses a Transformer architecture that is largely compatible with the Llama ecosystem. Developers can use standard libraries like transformers, vLLM, and llama.cpp to deploy the model. This "drop-in" compatibility simplifies the migration process from Llama-2 or Llama-3 8B models.
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