← Back to Model Hub/SIDE-BY-SIDE REVIEW
SHARE THIS:

Qwen3 Max Thinking vs Yi-Lightning

How do these models stack up? Below is an expert side-by-side comparison of specifications, context window capacity, live pricing per million tokens, and standardized benchmark scores for Qwen3 Max Thinking and Yi-Lightning.

Alibaba

Qwen3 Max Thinking

Qwen3-Max-Thinking is the flagship reasoning model in the Qwen3 series, designed for high-stakes cognitive tasks that require deep, multi-step reasoning. By significantly scaling model capacity and reinforcement learning compute, it...

View Full Specs
01.AI

Yi-Lightning

Yi-Lightning is 01.AI's (離一万物) fastest and most cost-efficient model, purpose-built for high-throughput production workloads. It delivers competitive performance against GPT-4o-mini and Claude Haiku at a fraction of the cost, with exceptional bilingual Chinese-English capabilities. Yi-Lightning excels at classification, entity extraction, summarization, and high-frequency API tasks where latency and cost-per-call are critical constraints.

View Full Specs

Technical Specifications

SpecificationQwen3 Max ThinkingYi-Lightning
ProviderAlibaba01.AI
Context Window262,144 tokens131,072 tokens
Agent SuitabilityN/A82/100
Time to First Token (TTFT)N/A120 ms
Deployment Modelself hostablemanaged api
Production Stabilitystablestable
API AvailableYesYes
Released Date2026-02-092025-10-01

API Pricing Comparison

Input Price per Million Tokens

Qwen3 Max Thinking

$0.78

Yi-Lightning

$0.15

Output Price per Million Tokens

Qwen3 Max Thinking

$3.90

Yi-Lightning

$0.30

Want to test both models live?

Run side-by-side prompt prompts in our dynamic Sandbox. Check execution speeds, latency metrics, and compute actual costs in real-time.

Open Live Sandbox Playground

Benchmark Performance Metrics

Scores show the raw performance percentages verified across key evaluation suites. Higher bars indicate superior accuracy and capability in that domain.

MMLUGeneral knowledge & multi-task understanding
9200.0%vsN/A
Qwen3 Max Thinking
Yi-Lightning
HumanEvalPython coding & logic synthesis
9650.0%vsN/A
Qwen3 Max Thinking
Yi-Lightning
MATHComplex mathematical problem solving
9120.0%vsN/A
Qwen3 Max Thinking
Yi-Lightning
GPQAGraduate-level expert reasoning
6200.0%vsN/A
Qwen3 Max Thinking
Yi-Lightning
HellaSwagCommonsense reasoning and inference
9120.0%vsN/A
Qwen3 Max Thinking
Yi-Lightning
MT-BenchMulti-turn conversation flow quality
945.0%vsN/A
Qwen3 Max Thinking
Yi-Lightning

Qwen3 Max Thinking Quirks & Gotchas

No developer gotchas reported.

Yi-Lightning Quirks & Gotchas

  • β–ΈBest cost-efficiency for high-volume bilingual applications
  • β–ΈSelf-hostable via Ollama β€” excellent open-weight option for Asian-language pipelines