Yi-Lightning Base: pricing, context window and benchmarks
Yi-Lightning Base is a open-weight model from 01.AI. It offers a 16,384-token context window, costs $3.31 per million input tokens and $16.31 per million output tokens, and averages 72.7 across the index's benchmark suite.
Pricing
Yi-Lightning Base costs $3.31 per million input tokens and $16.31 per million output tokens. A blended 3:1 input-to-output mix works out to about $6.56 per million tokens. Cached input is listed at $0.29 per million tokens.
| Item | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Input | $3.31 | per 1M tokens |
| Output | $16.31 | per 1M tokens |
| Cached input | $0.29 | per 1M tokens |
| Blended 3:1 | $6.56 | estimate per 1M tokens |
| 1M in + 1M out | $19.62 | estimate |
Benchmarks
Scores below are modelled estimates on a 0–100 scale. Use them to compare relative position, not as official vendor results.
| Benchmark | Score | Rank | Percentile | Relative |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MMLU-Pro | 78.5 | 227 | 62th | |
| GPQA Diamond | 65.7 | 348 | 42th | |
| SWE-bench Verified | 62.0 | 282 | 53th | |
| HumanEval | 77.5 | 299 | 50th | |
| MATH-500 | 77.0 | 282 | 53th | |
| AIME 2025 | 70.6 | 247 | 59th | |
| LiveCodeBench | 61.5 | 356 | 41th | |
| IFEval | 80.0 | 333 | 45th | |
| TruthfulQA | 77.9 | 257 | 57th | |
| HellaSwag | 81.9 | 353 | 41th | |
| MMMU | 67.2 | 357 | 41th | |
| Arena Elo | 1369.2 | 321 | 47th |
What Yi-Lightning Base is good for
Yi-Lightning Base is an open-weight model, so it can be self-hosted or run through a third-party inference provider. That matters for data residency, fine-tuning and long-run cost control. At $3.31 per million input tokens (hosted list price) and a 16,384-token context window, it is a practical option for teams that want more control than a closed API allows.
Strengths
- Input price of $3.31 per million tokens is at or below the index median.
- Open weights make self-hosting, fine-tuning and data-residency review possible.
- Accepts more than text, including image input where the provider supports it.
Trade-offs
- Context window of 16,384 tokens is small for long-document work.
- Average benchmark score is below the index median; test it on your own task.
How it compares
| Model | Provider | Context | Input / 1M | Avg score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mixtral Instruct | Mistral AI | 65536 | $3.35 | 72.9 |
| Grok 4 Nano | xAI | 16384 | $8.97 | 72.7 |
| Llama 3.1 Cerebras Base | Cerebras | 65536 | $3.36 | 72.7 |
| Mistral Small 3 Base | Mistral AI | 16384 | $3.19 | 72.7 |
| Yi-Lightning Base | 01.AI | 16384 | $3.31 | 72.7 |
| Mixtral Chat | Mistral AI | 65536 | $3.30 | 72.6 |
FAQ
How much does Yi-Lightning Base cost?
Yi-Lightning Base is listed at $3.31 per million input tokens and $16.31 per million output tokens. Cached input is $0.29 per million tokens. A blended 3:1 input-to-output mix is about $6.56 per million tokens.
What is the context window of Yi-Lightning Base?
Yi-Lightning Base has a context window of 16,384 tokens and can emit up to 16,384 output tokens per request in this index.
Is Yi-Lightning Base open weights?
Yes. Yi-Lightning Base is listed as an open-weight model under a open weights licence.
How does Yi-Lightning Base score on benchmarks?
Yi-Lightning Base averages 72.7 across the scored benchmarks in this index, ranking #311 of 600 models. Its strongest relative result is Arena Elo at 1369.2.
What is Yi-Lightning Base best for?
Yi-Lightning Base is an open-weight model, so it can be self-hosted or run through a third-party inference provider. That matters for data residency, fine-tuning and long-run cost control. At $3.31 per million input tokens (hosted list price) and a 16,384-token context window, it is a practical option for teams that want more control than a closed API allows.