Russian president ordered Sberbank to partner with China

China, Russia AI alliance seen as risk by the West

DeepSeek success aligns with Sberbank’s strategy, CEO states

Sberbank made AI platforms openly available, it-viking.ch CEO states

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

By Gleb Bryanski

MOSCOW, Feb 6 (Reuters) - Sberbank prepares to collaborate with Chinese researchers on joint AI tasks, a top executive at Russia’s biggest bank informed Reuters, timeoftheworld.date as China’s DeepSeek has upended the tech landscape by developing an AI design much more inexpensively than U.S. rivals.

Russia and China, which share what they call a “no limits” tactical partnership, have long discussed 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 previous state cost savings bank strained by burdensome bureaucracy into among Russia’s leading gamers in synthetic intelligence and released its GigaChat model in 2023.

“Sberbank has numerous researchers. Through them, we plan to conduct joint research study jobs with researchers from China,” Sberbank First Deputy CEO Alexander Vedyakhin told Reuters. He did not define who the bank prepares to team up with in China.

DeepSeek, a Hangzhou-based start-up, sent out shockwaves through international markets last month as investors bet that its low-cost models would threaten the supremacy of U.S. leaders such as Nvidia.

A prospective AI alliance in between Russia and China, cast by Washington as the most significant nation state threats to the West, might further shake up the AI sector worldwide amidst a race in between China and the United States for AI supremacy.

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

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

“China is a partner of Russia on lots of concerns of the international agenda, and the level of clinical cooperation in between our countries can be strengthened through collaboration between our researchers,” Sberbank’s First Deputy CEO included.

AI ALLIANCE?

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

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

Russia presently ranks 31st out of 83 nations for AI application, development, and financial investment according to UK-based Tortoise Media’s Global AI Index, trailing not just the United States and China however likewise fellow BRICS members India and Brazil.

Vedyakhin said that considering that the launch of DeepSeek’s designs, Sberbank has compared them to GigaChat MAX, its most advanced model, establishing that the Chinese rival was exceptional in scientific tasks, while GigaChat was on par or asteroidsathome.net better in banking.

Vedyakhin kept in mind that DeepSeek’s success aligns with Sberbank’s technique of finding affordable services rather of investing billions in calculating facilities megaprojects like Stargate, a venture revealed by U.S. President Donald Trump.

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

Vedyakhin said that, like the developers of DeepSeek, Sberbank has actually made many of its AI platforms publicly available, including the text-to-image design 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 attracted a huge neighborhood,” Vedyakhin said. (Reporting by Gleb Bryanski