Russia's Sberbank Plans Joint aI Research with China As DeepSeek
Russian president ordered Sberbank to partner with China
China, Russia AI alliance viewed as threat by the West
DeepSeek success lines up with Sberbank's strategy, CEO says
Sberbank made AI platforms openly available, CEO states
(Adds additional quotes, details on Russia's AI sector)
By Gleb Bryanski
MOSCOW, Feb 6 (Reuters) - Sberbank plans to team up with Chinese researchers on joint AI tasks, a top executive at Russia's biggest bank told Reuters, as China's DeepSeek has actually upended the tech landscape by developing an AI model much more inexpensively than U.S. competitors.
Russia and China, which share what they call a "no limitations" tactical partnership, have long spoke about AI cooperation - including 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 onerous bureaucracy into one of Russia's leading gamers in expert system and released its GigaChat model in 2023.
"Sberbank has numerous scientists. Through them, we plan to perform joint research tasks with researchers from China," Sberbank First Deputy CEO Alexander Vedyakhin told Reuters. He did not define who the bank prepares to work together with in China.
DeepSeek, a Hangzhou-based start-up, sent shockwaves through international markets last month as investors bet that its affordable models 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 threats to the West, could further shake up the AI sector worldwide amidst 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 decline, as China obstacles U.S. supremacy in whatever from AI and quantum computing to synthetic biology and hard military power.
The West's efforts to isolate Russia over the war in Ukraine have actually pushed Moscow and Beijing more detailed - and Putin has in current months explained China as an "ally".
"China is a partner of Russia on lots of problems of the global program, and the level of clinical cooperation in between our nations can be enhanced through cooperation in between our scientists," Sberbank's First Deputy CEO added.
AI ALLIANCE?
Putin has actually advised Sberbank, which is under Western sanctions, to develop cooperation with China and other BRICS nations in AI to challenge U.S. supremacy. But the true state of Russia's own AI jobs is difficult to assess as some are secret.
Like China, Russia is having a hard time to develop domestic computing capability due to sanctions that limit imports of the most current Western hardware, and is seeking alternative options to remain competitive in the AI race.
Russia currently ranks 31st out of 83 nations for AI implementation, innovation, and investment according to UK-based Tortoise Media's Global AI Index, not just the United States and China but also fellow BRICS members India and Brazil.
Vedyakhin said that because the launch of DeepSeek's designs, Sberbank has actually compared them to GigaChat MAX, its most innovative model, establishing that the Chinese competitor transcended in clinical jobs, while GigaChat was on par or better in banking.
Vedyakhin kept in mind that DeepSeek's success lines up with Sberbank's strategy of discovering low-priced services rather of investing billions in calculating infrastructure megaprojects like Stargate, a venture announced by U.S. President Donald Trump.
"DeepSeek has actually proven that even with lowered abilities, it is possible to attain quality on par with American designs. This raises questions about the necessity of severe 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 openly available, consisting of the text-to-image model Kandinsky, forum.altaycoins.com called after the 20th-century avant-garde painter Vassily Kandinsky, and its base design GigaChat Lite.
"The success of DeepSeek is mainly due to its transparency, which contrasts with the secrecy of OpenAI. This has attracted a substantial community," Vedyakhin said. (Reporting by Gleb Bryanski; Editing by Guy Faulconbridge and Alexander Smith)