A super-smart AI model from China is turning heads in the world of artificial intelligence. Created by a company called Beijing Lingyi Wanwu Information Technology, this model, known as the Yi series, is causing a buzz for a couple of reasons. First off, it’s open-source, which means it’s available for anyone to use and modify. Secondly, the Yi series is crazy good at understanding and handling tons of information—up to 200,000 tokens, to be precise. That’s way more than other popular models like Anthropic’s Claude (100,000 tokens) or OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 Turbo (128,000 tokens).
The Yi series comes in two versions: there’s the Yi-6B-200K, which is the lighter version, and then there’s the Yi-34B-200K, which is more powerful. Both of them are really good at keeping track of what’s being said in a conversation, and they’re smart enough to understand both English and Mandarin.
Soon after it was launched, this Yi series shot up the charts and became the second most popular open-source model on Hugging Face, a big spot for AI models.
One cool thing about these Yi series is that they’re not just good at handling tons of information—they’re also really efficient and accurate. They’ve beaten other big models in different tests, which is pretty impressive.
According to 01.AI, the team behind Yi, “Yi-34B is better than much bigger models like LLaMA2-70B and Falcon-180B. Plus, Yi-34B’s size makes it cost-effective for different uses, so developers can create some amazing stuff.” They’ve even shown in their tests that Yi is great at understanding stuff like reading, common sense, and other AI tests.
The Yi series models work by understanding and making sense of text, piece by piece. When they say “200K tokens of context,” it means they can understand and respond to really long bits of information that would’ve been too much for other similar AI models like Anthropic’s Claude and Open AI’s ChatGPT.
But there’s a catch: If you give the Yi model too much to think about at once, like more than 65% of its capacity, it might start having trouble getting things right. But if you keep it within that limit, it works really well, even better than some other models in certain situations.
One cool thing about the Yi model is that it’s completely open-source. That means anyone can use it on their own computers. It gives them control and they can change how it works, without needing any outside servers.
The people behind Yi series think that AI is going to be way more important than it already is, and they want everyone to be able to use it. By sharing this model with everyone, they hope to see all kinds of new and exciting AI applications being created using Yi.
So, these Yi-6B-200K and Yi-34B-200K models have a lot of potential. As AI becomes more and more a part of our lives, having this kind of AI that can be run locally, without relying on the cloud, could mean more security and customization.
While big models like Claude and Open AI GPT-4 Turbo get a lot of attention, this new open-source Yi series option might just be the future of AI, right on our own devices. If you’ve been thinking about upgrading your tech, you might want to consider it before your local AI gets outpaced by a more “context-aware” competitor.