While the US and China compete for AI dominance, Russia's leading model lags behind
But the model is "unremarkable" and lags behind US and Chinese offerings, AI experts told BI.
While the war in Ukraine has stunted development, Moscow may still be developing military AI.
Russian President Vladimir Putin wants his country to compete in the global race to build AI, besting models coming out of China and the US. But its flagship large language model, or LLM, isn't even the best at speaking Russian.
On the Russian-language version of LLM Arena — where users go to compare and rank the answers of different LLMs — GigaChat MAX comes joint-eighth at the time of writing, behind various versions of Claude, DeepSeek, and ChatGPT.
YandexGPT 4 Pro, an LLM developed by the Russian search engine Yandex, is even lower, at joint 18th.
On the English-language version, neither appears in the ranking of more than 170 LLMs.
GigaChat MAX was developed by Russia's state-majority-owned Sberbank. When its latest iteration launched in November, its Moscow-based lead developer, Evgeny Kosarev, said on LinkedIn that it was "close to GPT4o in quality on Russian and English."
But experts have told Business Insider that, despite Putin emphasizing AI development as a crucial avenue for Russian foreign policy, GigaChat MAX is months behind American and Chinese competitors. The country's war against Ukraine has also drained it of expertise.
Spokespeople for GigaChat MAX and Yandex did not respond to Business Insider's request for comment.
For now, GigaChat MAX, Russia's most developed LLM, is "unremarkable," Lukasz Olejnik, a visiting senior research fellow in cybersecurity at the War Studies department at King's College, London, told BI.
On "benchmarks" — standardized tests for AI effectiveness — the models' scores "are much lower," he said, adding that they don't surpass any of the cutting-edge, or "frontier," models, and don't involve any particular innovation.
Ben Dubow, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis and CTO of data-analysis firm Omelas, added that GigaChat MAX lacked an edge in many ways.
While it handles math well, in the Russian language it is far behind most leading Western and Chinese LLMs on some benchmarks, Dubow wrote in The Moscow Times in January.
He said that leading LLMs developed in the US were a year ahead of GigaChat MAX's current level on the industry-standard "Massive Multitask Language Understanding," or MMLU, which tests an LLM's general knowledge and problem-solving ability in text-based answers across a huge range of subjects.
Dubow also told BI that most AIs are being held to more advanced benchmarks, with MMLU "almost considered passé at this point."
"Besting American and Chinese models on Russian language prompts is a top priority for the Russian government's AI strategy, but MAX has not achieved that," Dubow said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly emphasized the importance of AI, including at a December conference where he touted GigaChat MAX and said Russia was ready to assist other nations with developing AI.
Samuel Bendett, a specialist in Russian military technology at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told BI that AI was "a status thing" for Russia.
But per a global AI ranking produced by UK media startup Tortoise Media, Russia is the only one out of the five "great power" countries — the US, China, France, the UK, and Russia — not at the top of the list. Russia is ranked 31st.
Bendett named several factors holding Moscow's AI sector back.
Russia's private sector is too small to foster real competition, with almost everything government-supported, he said.
Although Sberbank is increasingly casting itself as a technology company, "there is no equivalent to OpenAI and Microsoft or Google or Huawei or Alibaba," he continued.
Additionally, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has isolated it from both global expertise and collaboration, as well as access to tech like microchips necessary to train and run complex AI models efficiently.
"The story of the Russian AI industry is, in a lot of ways, Putin's expansionism undermining Russia's global standing," said Dubow.
2014 — when Russia annexed Crimea — was a transformative year for AI in the West and China.
Meanwhile, 2022, the year Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, was the year ChatGPT launched, sparking the generative AI boom.
The war in Ukraine accelerated a major brain drain from Russia, according to Dubow.
Bendett added that Russia lacks "hundreds of thousands" of high-tech researchers, although he said that he believed many of the "tech refugees" who left Russia to avoid the draft have started to trickle back.
Putin acknowledged the problems last year, blaming "unfriendly countries" for the roadblocks and vowing to increase the number of people graduating in AI technology to more than 15,000 a year by 2030, Russia's TASS news agency reported, citing government documents.
The report said just 3,000 graduated in 2022.
By comparison, the US had more than 73,000 graduates in AI-related fields in 2023, the majority of whom were international talent, according to the Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
Serhii Kupriienko, CEO of Swarmer, a Ukrainian startup specializing in AI-based systems, told BI that over the next decade, the US and China's LLMs will help them scale their economies "exponentially" by boosting productivity across various sectors, creating jobs in AI, and speeding up innovation.
Meanwhile, Russia's struggles with AI mean its likeliest path forward is to "be subordinate to China and rely on what China's producing," Dubow said.
The Kremlin's repeated public statements on AI and the ongoing war in Ukraine have led some analysts to conclude Russia may be secretly developing a dual-use LLM with military applications.
In 2022, a Russian official announced the creation of a department for developing AI within the defense ministry.
"Russia envisions AI as a transformative tool for its military," Saratoga Foundation military analysts Timothy Thomas and Glen Howard wrote in a February review of Russian writings on military AI.
Vitaliy Goncharuk, who chaired Ukraine's AI Committee between 2019 and 2022, believes Russia may be training its AI on the vast amounts of battlefield data being generated in Ukraine.
Telegram posts and channels, drone footage, satellite imagery, sound sensors, civilian reports, and hacked material from Ukraine's Delta cloud-based management system — which feeds Ukrainian commanders with battlefield data — all provide ample material, Goncharuk said.
AI developed on this would not only help Russia improve its precision in identifying targets but also help it plan its decision-making and real-time front-line operations, Goncharuk said. It could even predict Ukraine's future decision-making and future battlefield operations, he added.
Ukraine, too, has gathered vast quantities of battlefield data from three years of war — something that is "truly the holy grail of training your AI models and systems on battlefield target recognition and selection," Bendett told BI.
It would be difficult to imagine Russia not quietly also using this data, he added.
"They constantly hint at that," he said.
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