Sberbank Unveils Ambitious AI Plans for 2025
Russia’s largest lender, Sberbank, has announced it will launch a new large language model (LLM) next year, aiming to surpass the capabilities of leading competitors by introducing advanced reasoning skills to its flagship AI,
GigaChat. The move signals Sberbank’s intent to close the AI gap with global tech giants and bolster Russia’s technological sovereignty.
Introducing GigaChat 2.0: Russia’s Advanced LLM Series
The new release forms part of Sberbank’s broader initiative to enhance its family of LLMs. The latest,
GigaChat 2.0, includes several distinct versions:
- GigaChat 2 MAX: A high-powered model outperforming many foreign competitors in Russian language tasks.
- GigaChat 2 Pro: Matches the previous MAX version for quality, focused on creative and precise tasks with improved efficiency.
- GigaChat 2 Lite: Designed for lighter workloads, but now reaching quality levels of the previous Pro version, offering fast and cost-effective solutions.
Sberbank’s models are available to enterprises through cloud APIs and can also be deployed on-premises, making AI integration into business processes more accessible than ever before
[source].
Closing the Capability Gap: Reasoning and Comprehension
The next generation of
GigaChat aims to incorporate enhanced reasoning abilities—a feature that will enable the model to perform complex analyses and solve multi-step problems, a domain where current Russian models lag behind their American and Chinese counterparts. According to Sberbank, the model’s performance in areas like summarization, rewriting, complex Q&A, and document analysis has already seen a 23% improvement in quality compared to its predecessor
[source].
Competitive Positioning and Strategic Importance
Over 15,000 companies have adopted
GigaChat for various business tasks, reflecting Sberbank’s rapidly growing share in Russia’s AI sector. The new reasoning features are expected to further expand adoption. Sberbank underscores the strategic importance of robust Russian-language AI tools, especially amid rising competition and the need for technological independence
[source].
Industry Context: The Race Against Global Leaders
While
GigaChat’s latest iterations now rival models like
ChatGPT-3.5 in terms of language parameters, American and Chinese models such as
Gemini have set new benchmarks with chain-of-thought reasoning and larger memory capacities. Still, Sberbank’s progress is seen as a significant achievement in Russian-language AI, as it invests heavily in closing the global gap
[source].
Looking Ahead
With the launch of its advanced LLM in 2025, Sberbank positions itself at the forefront of Russia’s AI revolution, aiming to offer a locally developed alternative on par with international leaders—propelling Russian industries into a new era of intelligent automation and digital autonomy.
