“Yandex” announced the development of a sovereign language model Alice AI Foundation LLM

Yandex announced the creation of a large language model Alice AI Foundation LLM, which is positioned as a sovereign. The company stressed that it trained the neural network from scratch without third-party foreign components, Vedomosti writes.

The company claims the new model is strong in math, programming and other reasoning tasks. The Alice AI Foundation is trained on 18 trillion tokens and contains 80 billion parameters, of which 3 billion are active. The development should form the basis of the future reasoning model and agent capabilities of Alice AI. Yandex has put the model in open access with the opportunity for developers to use it or retrain it for their tasks. The cost of the technology in the company was not disclosed.

The concept of national and sovereign AI models was introduced by the law on artificial intelligence, which Russian President Vladimir Putin signed on July 26. Sovereign AI model should be developed at all stages only by a Russian legal entity and work only on infrastructure in Russia. Under this definition, only GigaChat from Sber has so far fallen under this definition. The national model should also be created by a Russian legal entity, but it can use foreign components and open source solutions such as Alice AI.