Russian president bought Sberbank to partner with China

China, Russia AI alliance viewed as risk by the West

DeepSeek success aligns with Sberbank’s method, CEO states

Sberbank made AI platforms openly available, CEO says

(Adds further quotes, details on Russia’s AI sector)

By Gleb Bryanski

MOSCOW, Feb 6 (Reuters) - Sberbank prepares to team up with Chinese researchers on joint AI projects, a magnate at Russia’s most significant bank informed Reuters, as China’s DeepSeek has upended the tech landscape by producing an AI model a lot more inexpensively than U.S. rivals.

Russia and China, which share what they call a “no limits” strategic partnership, have long talked about AI cooperation - consisting of in military applications - however little is publicly known about its depth or scope.

Sberbank, under CEO German Gref, has transformed itself from a Soviet-style former state savings bank strained by onerous bureaucracy into one of Russia’s leading players in synthetic intelligence and released its GigaChat design in 2023.

“Sberbank has lots of researchers. Through them, we prepare to conduct joint research study projects with scientists from China,” Sberbank First Deputy CEO Alexander Vedyakhin told Reuters. He did not specify who the bank prepares to collaborate with in China.

DeepSeek, a Hangzhou-based startup, sent out shockwaves through worldwide markets last month as financiers wager that its inexpensive designs would threaten the dominance of U.S. leaders such as Nvidia.

A prospective AI alliance between Russia and China, cast by Washington as the most significant nation state hazards to the West, could even more shake up the AI sector worldwide amid a race in between China and the United States for AI dominance.

President Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping share a broad world view which represents the West as decadent and in decrease, as China difficulties U.S. supremacy in everything from AI and quantum computing to synthetic biology and tough military power.

The West’s attempts to Russia over the war in Ukraine have actually pressed Moscow and Beijing more detailed - and Putin has in current months explained China as an “ally”.

“China is a partner of Russia on numerous concerns of the worldwide program, and the level of clinical cooperation in between our nations can be reinforced through partnership in between our researchers,” Sberbank’s First Deputy CEO included.

AI ALLIANCE?

Putin has actually instructed Sberbank, which is under Western sanctions, to build cooperation with China and other BRICS countries in AI to challenge U.S. dominance. But the real state of Russia’s own AI jobs is hard to examine as some are secret.

Like China, Russia is struggling to establish domestic computing capability due to sanctions that restrict imports of the current Western hardware, and is looking for alternative services to remain competitive in the AI race.

Russia currently ranks 31st out of 83 nations for AI implementation, innovation, ratemywifey.com and financial investment according to UK-based Tortoise Media’s Global AI Index, trailing not just the United States and China but likewise fellow BRICS members India and Brazil.

Vedyakhin said that given that the launch of DeepSeek’s designs, Sberbank has compared them to GigaChat MAX, its most sophisticated model, establishing that the Chinese rival transcended in scientific tasks, while GigaChat was on par or much better in banking.

Vedyakhin noted that DeepSeek’s success aligns with Sberbank’s strategy of discovering low-cost solutions rather of investing billions in computing facilities megaprojects like Stargate, a venture announced by U.S. President Donald Trump.

“DeepSeek has proven that even with reduced capabilities, it is possible to attain quality on par with American models. This raises concerns about the need of severe financial investments when there are engineering developments,” Vedyakhin said.

Vedyakhin said that, like the developers of DeepSeek, Sberbank has made most of its AI platforms openly available, including the text-to-image model Kandinsky, named after the 20th-century avant-garde painter Vassily Kandinsky, and its base model GigaChat Lite.

“The success of DeepSeek is mainly due to its openness, which contrasts with the secrecy of OpenAI. This has actually brought in a huge community,” Vedyakhin said. (Reporting by Gleb Bryanski