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Yi-9B-Chat
Yi-9B-Chat
Compact, Capable & Conversational
What is Yi-9B-Chat?
Yi-9B-Chat is the chat-optimized version of the Yi-9B model, a powerful and efficient 9 billion parameter large language model developed by 01.AI. Designed for real-world use cases, it delivers excellent performance in instruction-following, multi-turn conversations, code generation, and multilingual interactions all while maintaining efficient deployment and scalability.
Released under the Apache 2.0 license, Yi-9B-Chat is fully open, enabling commercial and research use, fine-tuning, and customization with complete access to model weights.
Key Features of Yi-9B-Chat
Use Cases of Yi-9B-Chat
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What are the Risks & Limitations of Yi-9B-Chat
Limitations
- Reasoning Logic Ceiling: Struggles with high-level, multi-step logical or mathematical proofs.
- Context Retrieval Drift: Performance decays significantly when approaching the 32K token limit.
- Knowledge Depth Limits: The 8.8B size lacks the "world knowledge" of 70B+ parameter models.
- Quadratic Attention Lag: High latency occurs when processing very long document summaries.
- Multilingual Nuance Gap: Reasoning depth is notably more robust in Chinese than in English.
Risks
- Safety Filter Gaps: Lacks the hardened, multi-layer refusal layers of proprietary APIs.
- Higher Hallucination Rate: Chat-tuning increases response diversity but raises factual errors.
- Implicit Training Bias: Reflects social prejudices found in its massive web-crawled dataset.
- Adversarial Vulnerability: Easily manipulated by simple prompt injection or roleplay attacks.
- Non-Deterministic Logic: Can provide inconsistent answers when regenerating the same query.
Benchmarks of the Yi-9B-Chat
Parameter
- Quality (MMLU Score)
- Inference Latency (TTFT)
- Cost per 1M Tokens
- Hallucination Rate
- HumanEval (0-shot)
Yi-9B-Chat
- 52.1%
- 0.45 s
- Free
- 12.8%
- 25.8%
Navigate to the Yi-34B model page
Visit 01-ai/Yi-34B (base) or 01-ai/Yi-34B-Chat (instruct-tuned) on Hugging Face to access Apache 2.0 licensed weights, tokenizer, and benchmarks outperforming Llama2-70B.
Install Transformers with Yi optimizations
Run pip install transformers>=4.36 torch flash-attn accelerate bitsandbytes in Python 3.10+ for grouped-query attention and 4/8-bit quantization support.
Load the bilingual Yi tokenizer
Execute from transformers import AutoTokenizer; tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("01-ai/Yi-34B", trust_remote_code=True) handling both English and Chinese seamlessly.
Load model with memory optimizations
Use from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM; model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("01-ai/Yi-34B", torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16, device_map="auto", load_in_4bit=True) for RTX 4090 deployment.
Format prompts using Yi chat template
Structure as "<|im_start|>system\nYou are helpful assistant<|im_end|>\n<|im_start|>user\n{query}<|im_end|>\n<|im_start|>assistant\n" then tokenize with return_tensors="pt".
Generate with multilingual reasoning
Run outputs = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=2048, temperature=0.7, do_sample=True) and decode tokenizer.decode(outputs[0], skip_special_tokens=True) for bilingual responses.
Pricing of the Yi-9B-Chat
Yi-9B-Chat, the instruction-tuned conversational variant of 01.AI's Yi-9B model (9 billion parameters, released 2023 with Yi-1.5 updates), is distributed open-source under Apache 2.0 license through Hugging Face and ModelScope, carrying no model access or download fees for commercial or research purposes. Its compact architecture supports efficient deployment on consumer-grade hardware like a single RTX 4090 GPU (12-24GB VRAM quantized Q4/Q8), incurring compute costs of roughly $0.20-0.60 per hour on cloud platforms such as RunPod or AWS g4dn equivalents, where it processes over 40,000 tokens per minute at 4K-32K context lengths with minimal electricity overhead for self-hosted inference.
Hosted API providers categorize Yi-9B-Chat within economical 7-13B tiers: Fireworks AI and Together AI typically charge $0.20-0.35 per million input tokens and $0.40-0.60 per million output tokens (blended rate around $0.30 per 1M with 50% batch discounts and caching), while platforms like OpenRouter offer pass-through pricing from $0.15-0.40 blended or free prototyping tiers via Skywork.ai; Hugging Face Inference Endpoints bill $0.60-1.50 per hour for T4/A10G instances, equating to about $0.10-0.20 per million requests with autoscaling. Advanced optimizations like vLLM serving or GGUF quantization further reduce expenses by 60-80% in production, making high-volume chat, coding assistance, and multilingual Q&A viable at scales far below proprietary LLMs.
In 2026 deployments, Yi-9B-Chat stands out for bilingual (English/Chinese) instruction-following and competitive benchmarks against Mistral-7B-Instruct or Gemma-2-9B, trained on 3.6 trillion tokens including enhanced fine-tuning on 3 million samples delivering GPT-3.5-level conversational quality at approximately 5-7% of frontier model inference rates, ideal for resource-constrained edge applications and developer tools.
As demand for lightweight, ethical, and multilingual AI grows, Yi-9B-Chat provides a scalable and open alternative to closed solutions backed by 01.AI’s commitment to openness and performance.
Get Started with Yi-9B-Chat
Frequently Asked Questions
While the standard Yi-9B base has a 4K window, the Yi-9B Chat (and specialized variants like Yi-Coder) are often optimized for much longer contexts using RoPE (Rotary Positional Embedding) scaling. Always check your specific weight-set; if it's the "200K" variant, you can process up to 400,000 Chinese characters or ~150,000 English words in a single prompt.
Yi-9B Chat is largely open-weight, but 01.AI requires a commercial license request if your application reaches a certain scale (typically 10 million Monthly Active Users). For most startups and internal tools, the model is free to use, but you must include the "Notice" file in your distribution.
Absolutely. Because it is a 9B model, you can perform QLoRA (4-bit Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation) on a GPU with as little as 16GB–24GB VRAM. This makes it one of the most powerful models for "DIY" fine-tuning on specialized technical datasets.
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