Russia wants to join global AI race

By Emre Gurkan Abay and Emir Yildirim

MOSCOW (AA) - Russia is accelerating its artificial intelligence (AI) efforts to join the global AI race, which has heated up since the release of the Chinese DeepSeek.

AI managed to surpass humans in some key tasks, such as “image classification and visual reasoning,” but it is still lagging behind in “competition-level math, visual commonsense reasoning and planning,” according to Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2024.

The report says that AI increased productivity and quality of jobs while bridging the qualification gap between workers with varying levels of education and skill.

IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said the AI use in developed economies is at 60% and as high as 40% in emerging economies, while attending the 55th Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last month.

- US maintains leadership in global AI race but Russia ramps up efforts

American tech giants Google, OpenAI, Amazon, Nvidia, and Meta Platforms maintain the US leadership in the global AI race.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini revolutionized text, image, and audio processing with AI but the unprecedented rise of DeepSeek overshadowed its competitors in performance, giving the major spotlight to China.

DeepSeek is developed using far fewer resources in chips and investment compared to its competitors and it runs more efficiently than American models, posing a threat to the US dominance in the global AI race.

The former Soviet Union was the US’ close tech rival during the Cold War but Russia, which has been lagging behind, wants to accelerate its efforts toward AI use in civilian and military activities.

Russia has recently become an emerging player in the AI field, especially through the developments achieved by Russian firms Sber (Sberbank) and Yandex.

Russia is among the 10 countries developing generative AI models and the Russian government expects AI’s contribution to its economy to reach $110 billion by 2030.

Sber dropped the “bank” on its tech investments and commissioned the GigaChat AI chatbot, a competitor to ChatGPT. Experts say GigaChat has increased productivity in government services so far.

The Russian firm Yandex launched its fourth generation YandexGPT and other Russian firms such as T-Bank, MTS, and VK are also looking to develop their own.

Meanwhile, Russia is testing its self-driving tractors on the Moscow-St. Petersburg route and other three-dimensional modeling systems powered by AI are employed to design equipment parts.

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed an executive order to set the framework for the country’s AI strategy, planning to complete integrated digital platforms in healthcare, industry, transportation, and public administration by 2030.

The country also aims to increase the number of university graduates in AI from 3,000 to 16,000 per year, hoping to see Russia become one of the leading countries in AI by improving cooperation with the BRICS bloc.

BRICS established the AI Alliance Network with Russia, and Putin instructed the government and Sber to cooperate with China in AI.

However, heavy sanctions against Moscow directly affect the country’s chip and hardware imports, making it very challenging to acquire the necessary equipment to produce semiconductors of its own.

Russia has been trying to compensate for the sanctions through products from China, among other intermediaries, and it is working toward shrinking the gap in IT workers who leave the country with incentives, in the form of providing low-interest housing loans and free training courses.

Experts say that Russia is lagging behind the US and China despite all its efforts, and that the worker shortage will continue to be a challenge moving forward, as well as the lack of international cooperation due to Western sanctions.