Yes, actually. They are not strangers to hype as well, to say the least, but like it or hate it, this part of the quote from the Reuters article you are referencing is accurate:
Alexander Vedyakhin, first deputy CEO of Sberbank, which is evolving from a major lender into an AI-focused technology conglomerate
Sberbank is, indeed, a strong, well-funded player (I do expect them to have both problems with compute due to sanctions and efficiency problems due to “ways of doing business typical for Russian Federation”, but this is not the first time we are hearing about their AI efforts, and there are no reasons to ignore or dismiss them).
In general, the standard attempts to formulate the situation as the USA-China race are misleading. A number of countries are very strong players, they might be slightly behind at the moment, but this can easily change (especially if some alternatives to Transformers start overtaking the current paradigm, or if there are other reasons for the leaders to experience a bit of a slowdown). This is very much a multilateral situation.
Intended tone was humorous, as in the ‘you guys have [X]s?’ meme, not to deny that Russia has such executives, although I haven’t seen anything notable from Sberbank. I’ve certainly kept an eye on Mistral and SSI if no one else.
However right now I think I’d list at least 5 American labs and 4 Chinese labs as substantially ahead of anyone anywhere else until proven otherwise, excluding SSI which is impossible to get a read on.
:-) Yes, well, Kandinsky AI series of text-to-image and text-to-video models is made by the Sber AI team (that’s Sberbank) :-) When bloggers from Russia generate AI visual art, that’s what they usually use :-) I don’t keep close track on them, but I see that they have progressed to Kandinsky 4.0 a year ago which is supposed to generate all multimedia, “New multimedia generation model for video in HD resolution and audio”...
There are a lot of small places which are difficult to keep track of (e.g. the most adventurous part of Liquid AI has recently split and formed Radical Numerics, whose approach is declared to be to “unlock recursive self-improvement”; their work in neural architecture search done while at Liquid AI has been pretty remarkable and more than just theoretical, so I understand why they want to make a straight play at recursive self-improvement, although I doubt they are giving enough thought on how to handle “true success”, which is unfortunate to say the least (they presumably still expect saturation of self-improvement, just at notably higher levels, and so they might not expect to encounter “true danger” soon)).
The better the coding models are, the more possibilities are there for small players with non-standard algorithmic ideas and desire for semi-automation of AI research, so the situation is becoming more fluid...
Except that AI-related research could likely require a ton of compute, which Russian companies aren’t on track to possess even if we compare them with Chinese ones, like DeepCent from AI-2027.
If one is talking about AGI/ASI and if one assumes that tons of compute would be critical for that, then yes, that’s probably correct. If novel research and algorithmic art turns out to be more crucial than compute, then it is less certain.
But so far, they have been able to train models which are used by people in Russia. So in more pedestrian AI terms, they are already a notable player and they have quite a bit of older compute.
In any case, other countries are more on track in terms of compute than Russia (American players are building data centers all over the world, and property rights might turn out to be… hmmm… “less than ironclad” in some cases, and non-American entities are buying a lot of compute as well). So when I talk about a multilateral situation, I do count Russia for its traditional strength in science and engineering, and for the fact that their government maintains a sustained and focused intense interest in the subject of very advanced AI, but I count a number of other countries ahead of it. Those countries don’t even have to be large; for example, Singapore is a formidable player, makes excellent specialized models, rich, good with tech, strong scientific and engineering culture. If we think that Ilya’s org has a shot at it, then Singapore also has a shot at it. (And yes, I am ready to buy Ilya’s argument that with a better research approach few billion might be enough. If one can afford to use more brute force, sure why not, but having too much brute force available tends to make one a bit too complacent and less adventurous in their search for new approaches.)
Yes, actually. They are not strangers to hype as well, to say the least, but like it or hate it, this part of the quote from the Reuters article you are referencing is accurate:
Sberbank is, indeed, a strong, well-funded player (I do expect them to have both problems with compute due to sanctions and efficiency problems due to “ways of doing business typical for Russian Federation”, but this is not the first time we are hearing about their AI efforts, and there are no reasons to ignore or dismiss them).
In general, the standard attempts to formulate the situation as the USA-China race are misleading. A number of countries are very strong players, they might be slightly behind at the moment, but this can easily change (especially if some alternatives to Transformers start overtaking the current paradigm, or if there are other reasons for the leaders to experience a bit of a slowdown). This is very much a multilateral situation.
Intended tone was humorous, as in the ‘you guys have [X]s?’ meme, not to deny that Russia has such executives, although I haven’t seen anything notable from Sberbank. I’ve certainly kept an eye on Mistral and SSI if no one else.
However right now I think I’d list at least 5 American labs and 4 Chinese labs as substantially ahead of anyone anywhere else until proven otherwise, excluding SSI which is impossible to get a read on.
:-) Yes, well, Kandinsky AI series of text-to-image and text-to-video models is made by the Sber AI team (that’s Sberbank) :-) When bloggers from Russia generate AI visual art, that’s what they usually use :-) I don’t keep close track on them, but I see that they have progressed to Kandinsky 4.0 a year ago which is supposed to generate all multimedia, “New multimedia generation model for video in HD resolution and audio”...
EDIT: Ah, they just released a series of 5.0 models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14993 and https://github.com/kandinskylab/kandinsky-5. So one can check where they are.
There are a lot of small places which are difficult to keep track of (e.g. the most adventurous part of Liquid AI has recently split and formed Radical Numerics, whose approach is declared to be to “unlock recursive self-improvement”; their work in neural architecture search done while at Liquid AI has been pretty remarkable and more than just theoretical, so I understand why they want to make a straight play at recursive self-improvement, although I doubt they are giving enough thought on how to handle “true success”, which is unfortunate to say the least (they presumably still expect saturation of self-improvement, just at notably higher levels, and so they might not expect to encounter “true danger” soon)).
The better the coding models are, the more possibilities are there for small players with non-standard algorithmic ideas and desire for semi-automation of AI research, so the situation is becoming more fluid...
Except that AI-related research could likely require a ton of compute, which Russian companies aren’t on track to possess even if we compare them with Chinese ones, like DeepCent from AI-2027.
If one is talking about AGI/ASI and if one assumes that tons of compute would be critical for that, then yes, that’s probably correct. If novel research and algorithmic art turns out to be more crucial than compute, then it is less certain.
But so far, they have been able to train models which are used by people in Russia. So in more pedestrian AI terms, they are already a notable player and they have quite a bit of older compute.
In any case, other countries are more on track in terms of compute than Russia (American players are building data centers all over the world, and property rights might turn out to be… hmmm… “less than ironclad” in some cases, and non-American entities are buying a lot of compute as well). So when I talk about a multilateral situation, I do count Russia for its traditional strength in science and engineering, and for the fact that their government maintains a sustained and focused intense interest in the subject of very advanced AI, but I count a number of other countries ahead of it. Those countries don’t even have to be large; for example, Singapore is a formidable player, makes excellent specialized models, rich, good with tech, strong scientific and engineering culture. If we think that Ilya’s org has a shot at it, then Singapore also has a shot at it. (And yes, I am ready to buy Ilya’s argument that with a better research approach few billion might be enough. If one can afford to use more brute force, sure why not, but having too much brute force available tends to make one a bit too complacent and less adventurous in their search for new approaches.)