Russian president bought Sberbank to partner with China

China, Russia AI alliance viewed as risk by the West

DeepSeek success lines up with Sberbank's method, CEO states

Sberbank made AI platforms openly available, CEO says

(Adds additional quotes, details on Russia's AI sector)

By Gleb Bryanski

MOSCOW, Feb 6 (Reuters) - Sberbank plans to collaborate with Chinese scientists on joint AI projects, asystechnik.com a top executive at Russia's most significant bank told Reuters, as China's DeepSeek has actually upended the tech landscape by producing an AI model much more cheaply than U.S. competitors.

Russia and China, which share what they call a "no limits" strategic partnership, have long talked about AI cooperation - consisting of in military applications - but little is publicly known about its depth or scope.

Sberbank, under CEO German Gref, has changed itself from a Soviet-style former state savings bank strained by onerous administration into among Russia's leading players in expert system and launched its GigaChat model in 2023.

"Sberbank has numerous researchers. Through them, we plan to perform joint research jobs with researchers from China," Sberbank First Deputy CEO Alexander Vedyakhin informed Reuters. He did not specify who the bank plans to collaborate with in China.

DeepSeek, a Hangzhou-based start-up, sent out shockwaves through worldwide markets last month as financiers wager that its inexpensive designs would threaten the supremacy of U.S. leaders such as Nvidia.

A possible AI alliance between Russia and China, cast by Washington as the most significant nation state risks to the West, might further shake up the AI sector worldwide amid a race between China and smfsimple.com the United States for AI supremacy.

President Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping share a broad world view which portrays the West as decadent and in decline, as China difficulties U.S. supremacy in everything 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 pressed Moscow and Beijing more detailed - and Putin has in current months explained China as an "ally".

"China is a partner of Russia on many issues of the global agenda, and the level of scientific cooperation in between our countries can be strengthened through partnership between our researchers," Sberbank's First Deputy CEO added.

AI ALLIANCE?

Putin has advised Sberbank, which is under Western sanctions, to build cooperation with China and other BRICS countries in AI to U.S. dominance. But the real state of Russia's own AI projects is tough to assess as some are secret.

Like China, Russia is having a hard time to develop domestic computing capacity due to sanctions that limit imports of the latest 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, and financial investment according to UK-based Tortoise Media's Global AI Index, trailing not only the United States and China however likewise fellow BRICS members India and Brazil.

Vedyakhin said that considering that the launch of DeepSeek's models, Sberbank has actually compared them to GigaChat MAX, its most advanced design, establishing that the Chinese rival transcended in scientific jobs, while GigaChat was on par or much better in banking.

Vedyakhin noted that DeepSeek's success lines up with Sberbank's method 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 proven that even with minimized capabilities, it is possible to attain quality on par with American models. This raises questions about the requirement of extreme financial investments when there are engineering developments," Vedyakhin said.

Vedyakhin said that, like the creators of DeepSeek, Sberbank has actually made many of its AI platforms publicly available, including the text-to-image model Kandinsky, called 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 attracted a big neighborhood," Vedyakhin said. (Reporting by Gleb Bryanski; Editing by Guy Faulconbridge and Alexander Smith)