AI arrives in Russia: Sberbank launches GigaChat, a clone of ChatGPT

Russian lender Sberbank (SBER.MM) said it has released the technology GigaChata ChatGPT clone available in Russia.

The chatbot is currently in testing and is available by invitation only. However it marks Russia’s official entry into the burgeoning artificial intelligence (AI) market.

Russia also has its own AI technology: GigaChat tries to compete with ChatGPT

Sberbank stated that what distinguishes GigaChat from ChatGPT is its ability to communicate more intelligently in Russian compared to other foreign neural networks.

Reuters reports that the Russian bank has invested heavily in technology in recent years, seeking to reduce the country’s dependence on Western imports. A choice that proved to be vital when, following the invasion of Ukraine, Western companies stopped doing business in Russia.

Last year’s release of ChatGPT, a chatbot from Microsoft-funded startup OpenAI, generated a real tech boost. This has put artificial intelligence technologies at the center of the market. In quick succession several AI variants arose, from image generation (think Midjourney) to textual ones (such as Bing Chatowned by Microsoft). Google also continues unabated in the development of its own AI chatbot called Bard (who seems to be a bit paranoid though). In the meantime, as we well know, ChatGPT has been suspended indefinitely from the Italian territory.

As in the 1960s, with the space race between the US and Russia, in a period of new Cold War the race now seems to be AI.

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