A top executive at the largest bank in Russia says artificial intelligence is becoming a new dividing line between global powers, similar to the nuclear era.
In an interview with Reuters at Russia’s annual AI Journey event, Sberbank’s first deputy CEO, Alexander Vedyakhin, says only countries that build their own foundation models will hold strategic influence in the decades ahead.
“AI is like a nuclear project. A new ‘nuclear club’ is emerging globally, where either you have your own national large language model or you don’t.”
He notes that Russia must develop multiple homegrown systems rather than rely on foreign models, citing security and sovereignty concerns across public services, healthcare and education.
“It is impossible to upload confidential information into a foreign model. It is simply prohibited. Doing so would lead to very unpleasant consequences.”
Vedyakhin says domestic capabilities will also shape Russia’s competitive position as new AI architectures and larger model memory push the next wave of breakthroughs. He also says Russia plans to rely on engineering depth and mathematical expertise to offset resource constraints.
“What we can’t achieve with sheer numbers, we achieve with skill.”
But he notes that Russia is lagging behind the US and China in the new “nuclear club.”
“In this race, every day matters, but those who haven’t started are falling behind the leaders by much more than a day with each passing day. For those who decide to join now, it will be extremely costly, almost impossible. We appreciate what Chinese and American companies have done. We understand they have a strong head start with plenty of money, experts and computing power.”
Vedyakhin says Sberbank’s GigaChat 2 MAX LLM is at the level of ChatGPT 4.0, while its new GigaChat Ultra Preview is comparable to ChatGPT 5.0.
The Sberbank executive also claims that Russia will not suffer from an AI bubble due to controlled spending.
“We believe that excessive investments in AI infrastructure may indeed fail to pay off, given the rapid pace of technological development.”
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