Russian president ordered Sberbank to partner with China

China, Russia AI alliance viewed as risk by the West

DeepSeek success aligns with Sberbank's strategy, CEO states

made AI platforms openly available, CEO says

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

By Gleb Bryanski

MOSCOW, Feb 6 (Reuters) - Sberbank prepares to team up with Chinese researchers on joint AI jobs, a top executive at Russia's biggest bank told Reuters, as China's DeepSeek has overthrown the tech landscape by producing an AI design far more inexpensively than U.S. competitors.

Russia and China, which share what they call a "no limitations" tactical partnership, have long discussed AI cooperation - including in military applications - but little is openly known about its depth or scope.

Sberbank, under CEO German Gref, photorum.eclat-mauve.fr has actually transformed itself from a Soviet-style former state cost savings bank strained by difficult bureaucracy into among Russia's leading players in expert system and launched its GigaChat model in 2023.

"Sberbank has numerous researchers. Through them, we prepare to conduct joint research tasks with scientists from China," Sberbank First Deputy CEO Alexander Vedyakhin informed Reuters. He did not specify who the bank prepares to team up with in China.

DeepSeek, a Hangzhou-based start-up, sent shockwaves through global markets last month as financiers wager that its low-cost models would threaten the dominance of U.S. leaders such as Nvidia.

A possible AI alliance between Russia and China, cast by Washington as the biggest country state dangers to the West, might further shake up the AI sector worldwide in the middle of a race between China and the United States for AI dominance.

President Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping share a broad world view which portrays the West as decadent and in decline, as China challenges U.S. supremacy in everything from AI and quantum computing to artificial biology and tough military power.

The West's attempts to separate Russia over the war in Ukraine have pressed Moscow and Beijing more detailed - and Putin has in recent months explained China as an "ally".

"China is a partner of Russia on many issues of the international program, and the level of clinical cooperation between our nations can be strengthened through collaboration between our researchers," Sberbank's First Deputy CEO included.

AI ALLIANCE?

Putin has instructed Sberbank, which is under Western sanctions, to construct cooperation with China and other BRICS countries in AI to challenge U.S. supremacy. But the real state of Russia's own AI jobs is difficult to evaluate as some are secret.

Like China, Russia is having a hard time to develop domestic computing capability due to sanctions that limit imports of the most recent Western hardware, and is seeking alternative services to remain competitive in the AI race.

Russia currently ranks 31st out of 83 nations for AI application, development, and financial investment according to UK-based Tortoise Media's Global AI Index, trailing not just the United States and China however also fellow BRICS members India and Brazil.

Vedyakhin said that considering that the launch of DeepSeek's designs, Sberbank has actually compared them to GigaChat MAX, its most sophisticated model, developing that the Chinese competitor was superior in clinical jobs, while GigaChat was on par or better in banking.

Vedyakhin kept in mind that DeepSeek's success lines up with Sberbank's strategy of discovering affordable options rather of investing billions in calculating infrastructure megaprojects like Stargate, a venture announced by U.S. President Donald Trump.

"DeepSeek has actually shown that even with reduced capabilities, it is possible to attain quality on par with American designs. This raises questions about the necessity of extreme investments when there are engineering developments," Vedyakhin said.

Vedyakhin said that, like the developers of DeepSeek, Sberbank has actually made most of its AI platforms openly available, including the text-to-image model Kandinsky, named after the 20th-century avant-garde 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 brought in a huge community," Vedyakhin said. (Reporting by Gleb Bryanski; Editing by Guy Faulconbridge and Alexander Smith)