The technological battle is not only happening in the field of chips, but also in artificial intelligence. And Russia is well aware of this. Today the launch of GigaChat, a chatbot of Russian origin that will rival ChatGPT.
Sberbank is the company behind GigaChat. We are facing the largest bank in Russia, controlled in at least 60% by the Russian government.
Among the advantages that GigaChat promises, there is one very obvious one, since it promises that you will be able to communicate more skillfully in Russian. At the moment, this new chatbot is in closed beta by invitation.
For the past few years, Russia’s main bank has been one of the leading companies in the country in investment in technologyfrom blockchain and now going through artificial intelligence.
Russia jumps on the AI bandwagon
This investment is part of a process by Russian companies to depend less on foreign technology, at a time when the country is subject to multiple economic blockades.
Sberbank is the first major Russian tech company to showcase its ChatGPT rival. In this case, it will be based on a model called NEON (‘Neural Omnimodal Network with Knowledge-Awareness’). As the company explains, GigaChat can hold a conversation and answer questions, as well as create images by incorporating the Kandisky 2.1 model.
As described by Sberbank, they plan to release version 3.5 of NeONKA, which will have 13 billion parameters. For comparison, GPT-2 had 1,500, but GPT-3 hits 175 billion parameters.
“The new Sber project that we have presented today is a breakthrough for the entire vast universe of Russian technology. In addition, GigaChat is unique in that it has an open source architecture.while their global counterparts pursue a closed AI strategy”, boasted Herman Gref, CEO of Sberbank, in what can be understood as a dart towards ChatGPT and its rapid transition from academia to the commercial world.
Equivalent to what OpenAI does, Sberbank will offer this AI to other, presumably Russian, companies via an API.
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