Russia's Sberbank Plans Joint aI Research with China As DeepSeek
Russian president bought Sberbank to partner with China
China, Russia AI seen as threat by the West
DeepSeek success aligns with Sberbank's method, CEO says
Sberbank made AI platforms publicly available, CEO says
(Adds additional 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 tasks, nerdgaming.science a leading executive at Russia's greatest bank informed Reuters, as China's DeepSeek has overthrown the tech landscape by creating an AI design much more cheaply than U.S. competitors.
Russia and China, which share what they call a "no limitations" tactical collaboration, have long spoke about AI cooperation - including in military applications - but little is openly understood about its depth or scope.
Sberbank, under CEO German Gref, has actually changed itself from a Soviet-style former state savings bank strained by difficult bureaucracy into among Russia's leading players in artificial intelligence and launched its GigaChat model in 2023.
"Sberbank has numerous scientists. Through them, we prepare to carry out joint research tasks with researchers from China," Sberbank First Deputy CEO Alexander Vedyakhin told Reuters. He did not specify who the bank plans to collaborate with in China.
DeepSeek, a Hangzhou-based start-up, sent out shockwaves through international markets last month as financiers wager that its affordable designs would threaten the supremacy of U.S. leaders such as Nvidia.
A possible AI alliance in between Russia and China, cast by Washington as the biggest nation state dangers to the West, might further shake up the AI sector worldwide in the middle of a race in between China and the United States for AI dominance.
President Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping share a broad world view which depicts the West as decadent and in decrease, as China difficulties U.S. supremacy in everything from AI and quantum computing to artificial biology and tough military power.
The West's attempts to isolate Russia over the war in Ukraine have pushed Moscow and Beijing more detailed - and archmageriseswiki.com Putin has in recent months explained China as an "ally".
"China is a partner of Russia on many problems of the worldwide program, and the level of clinical cooperation in between our countries can be strengthened through cooperation between our scientists," Sberbank's First Deputy CEO included.
AI ALLIANCE?
Putin has advised Sberbank, which is under Western sanctions, to construct cooperation with China and other BRICS countries in AI to challenge U.S. dominance. But the real state of Russia's own AI projects is hard to assess as some are secret.
Like China, Russia is struggling to develop domestic computing capability due to sanctions that limit imports of the most 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 execution, innovation, swwwwiki.coresv.net 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 given that the launch of DeepSeek's models, Sberbank has compared them to GigaChat MAX, its most sophisticated model, establishing that the Chinese rival transcended in clinical jobs, while GigaChat was on par or better in banking.
Vedyakhin noted that DeepSeek's success aligns with Sberbank's strategy of discovering affordable solutions instead of investing billions in computing facilities megaprojects like Stargate, a venture revealed by U.S. President Donald Trump.
"DeepSeek has actually shown that even with reduced abilities, it is possible to attain quality on par with American models. This raises questions about the necessity of extreme financial investments when there are engineering innovations," Vedyakhin said.
Vedyakhin said that, like the creators of DeepSeek, Sberbank has actually made the majority of its AI platforms openly available, online-learning-initiative.org consisting of the text-to-image model Kandinsky, named after the 20th-century progressive painter Vassily Kandinsky, and its base model GigaChat Lite.
"The success of DeepSeek is mainly due to its transparency, which contrasts with the secrecy of OpenAI. This has actually attracted a huge community," Vedyakhin said. (Reporting by Gleb Bryanski; Editing by Guy Faulconbridge and Alexander Smith)