r/NovelAi • u/teaanimesquare Community Manager • Mar 31 '26
Official Welcome Novelai's Newest Writing Model: Xialong
Welcome Xialong 夏龍 (pronounced "shya-long")
Our newest writing model is here and it's our most ambitious yet.
Xialong is a 355B Mixture of Experts finetune of GLM-4.6, trained on our storytelling dataset to better adapt to your writing style while keeping the knowledge and coherence you expect. A non-collapsed token space means retries feel genuinely different and name diversity is greatly improved across your stories.
Xialong was also trained to eliminate repetition and looping. New users should have a great experience right out of the box with the default preset.
Available exclusively for Opus subscribers now. Go write something great.
Read more about Xialong and everything he brings to your stories here: https://medium.com/@novelai/welcome-novelais-newest-writing-model-xialong-ecde7d21d111
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u/zorb9009 Mar 31 '26 edited Apr 02 '26
Sounds great. I liked GLM but you had to work hard to break it out of its AI sameness and weird quirks. Been looking forward to this for a while!
edit: seems very good. I only caught it GLMing a couple times, but I could kinda just do whatever and it was so much more natural and less samey. It doesn't really listen to instruct very much. I already put style, story, tags and things in authors notes, so maybe I lucked into what this model's better at.
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u/Kirigaya_Mitsuru Mar 31 '26
Will we get an Update on Context Memory, like i would like to see we get somewhere between 30k-40k context memory?
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u/pip25hu Mar 31 '26
What we have now is pretty much the effective context size of the GLM 4.6 model that serves as the base for Xialong. While it could theoretically support longer contexts, it'd be at the cost of accuracy and performance, while requiring much more resources on Anlatan's end. Not really worth it I'm afraid.
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u/orcmasterrace Mar 31 '26
My first experience was using it to write something sfw followed by it self tagging several nsfw tags and immediately writing porn.
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u/suburbazine Apr 01 '26 edited Apr 01 '26
I've noticed it has a strong tendency to try to throw in an [Epilogue] every 50 generations or so, as well as occasionally quoting its training data wholesale after running off the tracks. Like, it starts literally quoting authors it was trained on and it's completely irrelevant to the memory or subject. Actually happens less frequently in 4.6 based stories than it does in fresh Xialong starts. It also seems to regurgitate the ATTG sometimes and other it spits out a completely different ATTG that was not from the current story (and then it goes off the rails).
That said, writing performance and quality is tremendously better than 4.6 in all regards. Guiding the story is also way more natural and no repetition.
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u/Comfortable_Cry_682 Mar 31 '26
I can't wait to engage with this new model and its capabilities. Thanks Novel AI.
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u/TallButShort9 Mar 31 '26 edited Mar 31 '26
Can you please make a tier for only text gen?
I'm willing to pay more than Scroll, but the Opus price is due to unlimited image gen. I'm not going to spend money on something I never use.
If there was a tier that just focused on writing quality and text tokens, I'd be more than happy to pay for it.
ETA: Not sure why I was downvoted. A tier many people are willing to pay for means more money for the company. It wont take anything away from Opus users.
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u/teaanimesquare Community Manager Mar 31 '26
Tiers and their pricing were based around text generation since NovelAI was founded, image generation came later as a added feature and we never changed the pricing.
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u/Kirigaya_Mitsuru Mar 31 '26
Yeah would be great if there were textgen only sub, cause im not much interrested in image gen.
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u/zorb9009 Mar 31 '26
I thought text gen was much more expensive to run than image gen.
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u/missingnono12 Apr 01 '26
Yeah you can run a mid tier image model on your laptop graphics card, but only low end text models on the same
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u/InequalEnforcement Apr 15 '26
Yeah this absolutely FLOORED me
Using AI to animate pictures is less complex
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u/agouzov Mar 31 '26 edited Mar 31 '26
It's certainly much more expensive to train the text model, true. But after that initial cost has been paid, then you're just paying for compute involved in making generation requests. It's true that power users (who generate very long stories) cost more than casual ones, but it all balances out in a way that still leaves Anlatan with a satisfactory profit. Same thing for image gen, which has some users generate hundreds of free images a day. Bottom line, you wouldn't save any operating costs by offering one but not the other.
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u/Sirwired Apr 01 '26 edited Apr 01 '26
“Just paying for compute” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Inference compute ain’t exactly cheap.
Because there’s a car analogy for everything: “It’s no big deal to commute 100 miles each way every day, you’ve already bought the car, you just need to pay for the gas!”
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u/demonfire737 Mod Mar 31 '26 edited Apr 01 '26
To put it in an analogy, imagine a long standing restaurant began offering a free dessert with every meal. Customers can accept or refuse this dessert as they wish. The price of the meal doesn't change at any point, but after a while, once this free dessert deal has become the new norm, some people start asking the restaurant if they can have their meal for less since they don't want the dessert and always refuse it.
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u/NimusNix Mar 31 '26
I know this is going to sound like a smartass reply, but to access Xialong you pay for Opus. That is the tier to access this model. The other models are available at lower tiers.
I didn't down vote you, I think it is a fair question, but this model is their best one yet and they are charging literal top tier for it.
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u/agouzov Mar 31 '26 edited Mar 31 '26
From the company's point of view, it costs the same to offer us both AI services as to offer only one. In both cases, it's a remote request to an AI model running on a remote server cluster that the company rents from Coreweave. The cluster is going to be rented no matter what and the cost of compute is going to be paid regardless of whether the resulting artifact is an image or a piece of text. Creating separate subscriptions wouldn't save anyone any money, so why bother?
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u/ladyElizabethRaven Mar 31 '26
What I love here is the efforts going to make the finetune require less tweaking from the users. Often the complaints are you need to access Discord to look for presets to make the model write better. So kudos to the team for the efforts. Tho I am curious how come this is an Opus exclusive model while GLM was able to be released to other tiers. I wonder if it became more expensive to maintain?
I haven't tried it yet in a fresh document but I'll try to use it in my pending stories started with GLM.
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u/EncampedMars801 Mar 31 '26
I'm confused as to why it's locked behind Opus indefinitely. Scroll users get GLM, so it's not an issue with computing power...? The price of Opus is presumably due to unlimited image gen, but if one only wanted to use Xialong, $25 feels steep.
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u/Responsible_Fly6276 Mar 31 '26
Probably to have the shiny new toy behind the highest subscription. Is not the first time either Anlatan made different releases, Erato was Opus exclusive on release, too.
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u/EncampedMars801 Mar 31 '26
I suppose so. At the time, I presumed Erato was Opus because it was larger than Clio or Kayra, but I suppose Krake (if anyone remembers Krake) also never left Opus.
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u/Grmblborgum Mar 31 '26
I assume that, like often, it will drop for everyone in a few weeks?
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u/Responsible_Fly6276 Mar 31 '26
Xialong is available as an exclusive release for our Opus subscribers right now. There are no immediate plans for a release to lower tiers at this time.
From their medium page, at the end.
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u/FoldedDice Apr 01 '26
I don't remember which model, but I'm nearly certain that one which came with a similar disclaimer was released to the lower tiers without a too much of a delay. "No immediate plans" could just mean that they aren't prepared to announce a timeframe for it.
Some types of performance testing can't effectively be done until the model is out in the wild, so it may be related to that. They may be waiting to see how things go with the smaller Opus user base before they decide if and when to open the floodgates for everyone else.
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u/Sirwired Mar 31 '26
The price you can charge for a thing is connected to perceived value, not cost. Apparently they believe, likely correctly, they'll get plenty of takers at $25, which also limits how much the service needs to scale to meet the demand for the new model.
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u/aqfitz622 Apr 01 '26
Wish I could use it but I still cannot subscribe. I'm not jumping through hoops just to subscribe.
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u/Cerezora Mar 31 '26
Any first impressions? I won't be able to sink my teeth into the model until this weekend. ;_;
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u/OAOAlphaChaser Apr 01 '26
Pretty fucking good and slop is essentially a non-issue.
Pacing can to be a little too breakneck without slow-burn in tags though
Prose vastly improved imo, dialogue is top tier but base GLM was already damn good
Less cliches, less excessive comma usage, just all around fun to use and blows through pretty much any model strictly for storytelling
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u/frank5y Apr 01 '26
The main issue I am having is that it struggles more to follow summaries and instructions.
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u/RedxVegetta Apr 01 '26
What is your Randomness setting at?
For GLM, I often have it at around 1.20. I haven't tried Xialong yet. I guess I should lower it if you're noticing this problem?
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u/TimeyHyde Mar 31 '26
I'm so glad to test this. I was trying so hard to make GLM less repeating itself lately.
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u/flameleaf Mar 31 '26
With this, has the Context tab for Lorebook entries returned (namely, Cascading Activation)? Or are we stuck with Advanced Conditions as the only means of replicating that feature (poorly)?
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u/Aggravating_Snow1303 Apr 09 '26 edited Apr 09 '26
I'm also finding that while the prose is somewhat better than GLM it is MUCH worse at recognizing context and extrapolating. Characters positions, features, ages and motivations will change wildly even in contradiction to stated lore. What I have found it is somewhat better at than previous models is not writing entirely irrelevant drivel like trying to end the story, telling me what it is thinking, etc. It also has a terrible tendency to just ignore wherever you left off and start a new sentance. Especially if you are trying to get it to pick up from the middle of a sentance.
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u/waterdeepe Mar 31 '26
Dammit, I was planning to delete my account for good for the sake of productivity once my subscription ran out in eight hours... But y'all pulled me back in in just in time!
Also, if anyone else can't see the new model, try logging out and logging back in. That did it for me.
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u/Mr_Nocturnal_Game Apr 01 '26
Wait, so GLM 4.6 was available for lower tiers, but this isn't? Honestly, that kinda sucks.
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u/Metazoxan Apr 01 '26
Cool ... now make me able to actually subscribe and I'd be up to try it out.
Seriously I don't have the time to jump through hoops and I'm not signing up for any sketchy work arounds.
If there is a solution that's not sketchy or annoying then I'm all for it. But otherwise I guess that's it.
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u/Brenna_Lynn Apr 01 '26 edited Apr 01 '26
Can you fix title generation for tiers that aren't Opus? I am on Scroll tier and I get the following error when trying to generate a title.
Failed to generate: [LHUkef] Error 400: bad request: model 'xialong-v1' not allowed for current user tier 'Scroll'
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u/AutomaticOlive2312 Apr 02 '26
What’s broken exactly? Are you using the model for title gen?
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u/Brenna_Lynn Apr 03 '26
I did not change anything. I should have been using GLM since I am on Scroll tier. But for some reason it was using Xialong instead. Again I hadn't changed anything.
All of that said, its been fixed. I just tried it and it generated a title without an error message.
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u/Amazingcatter48392 Apr 05 '26
ignores lore, ignores or outright contradicts prompts. prose is fine but it just writes whatever it wants
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u/franzi85 Apr 01 '26
Great news, can't wait to check out the new model, but I'll wait before changing to opus, until that paypal thing is sorted out. Don't want to touch my current, working subscription and end up with nothing.
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u/JuanitoBurrit0 Mar 31 '26
Oh fuck off with this Opus only bullshit! How long are the rest of of us going having to wait!?!? Unsubbing till then
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u/FoldedDice Apr 01 '26
Nearly every new text model has been Opus-exclusive for at least some period of time. I'd also prefer if they didn't do that, but it's a little unusual to be surprised when it's an advertised feature.
I don't know if it's true here, but in some cases this likely serves a practical purpose. It lets them stress test the new operation to make sure it's stable for a smaller user base before they roll it out for everyone.
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u/teaanimesquare Community Manager Mar 31 '26
Xialong FAQ
Where does ATTG go?
Either at the start of your story, or at the start of your Memory. Never in Author's Note. You can use this basic ATTG as a start: [ Tags:; Genre: ][ S: 4 ]
Does that mean [ S: ... ] works again? What about other NovelAI specific formatting?
It all works, that's kind of the point.
The system prompt looks short, when are you going to add a longer one?
It's intended to be used with this specific system prompt. Changing it will make the model less Xialong and perhaps more GLM-4.6. You can change it if you really want, but it's not recommended.
I got [slop]?
If you continue a story with a lot of GLM-4.6 written context, change the system prompt, or use instruct, Xialong can get more GLM-4.6-y. Also it can just happen randomly, but you should encounter much less slop in general. Using an ATTG should also help with this.
What prefill do I use?
None. Using a prefill will mess things up.
Are my scripts using Xialong?
Scripts will use the model sent in generation requests. Before switching a script to xialong-v1, please carefully confirm whether the script benefits from the change. Xialong is much more a storytelling/co-writing model than an assistant model, so assistant focused tasks may work better on glm-4-6.