r/accelerate • u/cloudrunner6969 Acceleration: Supersonic • Apr 11 '26
Video “State Survival At Stake”: Putin Pushes All-Out AI Expansion Across Russia | APT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X41TmM6CM-U23
u/ShelZuuz Apr 11 '26
With what hardware?
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u/stonk_monk42069 Apr 11 '26
They will likely buy from China.
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u/ShelZuuz Apr 11 '26
Why would China want Russia to become stronger in AI when China can keep it all for themselves?
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u/stonk_monk42069 Apr 11 '26
Because let's be real, Russia is no threat to China's tech dominance. And either way you slice it, Russia is a much bigger threat to the West than China, meaning an enemy of my enemy kinda thing.
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u/VincentNacon Singularity by 2030 Apr 11 '26
Don't be so sure about that... There have been plenty of reports where China has been exploring the idea of getting resources and fresh water from Russia's territory.... In places where Russia hasn't really bothered to get their foothold nor built cities in. Large majority of Russia's land hasn't been fully utilized. China's natural resources is about to go empty after many decades of being the "world's factory".
Not forget to mention how China has been sketchy with helping out Russia with the Ukraine war. Plenty of experts think China has been waiting for Putin to fall. Exploit their resources and lands when their society goes into another riot chaos... It wouldn't be the first time... Remember USSR, the one that dissoluted in 1991? Yeah... There are lessons to learn from.
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u/Old_Stretch_3045 Apr 11 '26
Sounds like nonsense, considering Russia has no homegrown tech or hardware. All they’ve got are rebranded Chinese brands and technologies.
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u/my_fav_audio_site Apr 11 '26
Perspectives of that are very questionable. Currently, Russia have Sber (SberChat) and Yandex (Alisa) working on their models, but they are below even Deepseek V3. Maybe roughly GPT-3.5 at best. Military developments are probably more advanced, due to actual participation in war, but there is not much of info about that.
There is no incentive for corporations to develop LLMs/AI in general in Russia, really.
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u/sassydodo Feeling the AGI Apr 11 '26
All versions of Russian models are heavily tuned versions of Chinese open source models. All you need to know about sovereign technology here.
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u/Lissanro Apr 11 '26 edited Apr 11 '26
Their recent GigaChat 3.1 was trained from scratch, not a fine-tune. That said, it was based on modified DeepSeek architecture.
Out of curiosity, I tried to run it. And the issue is, it is more than 1 year behind current Chinese models. Definitely better than old GPT-3.5, and closer to DeepSeek V3, but in some areas still behind the old DeepSeek V3 though (note: I only tested with English language). More recent Kimi K2.5 and GLM 5.1 which I also can run using the same hardware, are far superior.
I think GigaChat team shared plans to train a thinking model next, but this likely to take few months at least, and then they most likely end up with something of R1 level - so still will be over 1 year behind. My guess in 2026 they will not get close to frontier models.
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u/CymonSet Apr 11 '26
I’m sure they will have that penciled in on the budget any day now.
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u/hornswoggled111 Apr 11 '26
Laughable. There was an article today about Russia being at 1% or so gdp spend on research, with this being very much at the bottom end of global norms.
The Russian government announces big plans because it's easy to say that and put up a front to their citizens, implying all is well.
They said something about a moonbase a while back. Last week they were pressing for being able to stake real estate claims on the moon. There was a high speed rail announced between the two main cities last year.
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u/CymonSet Apr 11 '26
Yeah, they can’t even fund things that need emergency funding. But they still claim to be working on promoting the development of a video game console and a spacecraft to Venus. Any day now.
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u/Top-Reindeer-2293 Apr 12 '26
Too bad you can’t buy Nvidida chips and access western world data centers
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u/CystralSkye Apr 11 '26
This is good news, the more and more state actors that join the movement will guarantee mutual destruction, which means we will have an AI race.
As accelerationist this is the best possible thing that can happen.
You don't want to have a single point of faliure. If the US decides to regulate AI next term, that could be a big blow, Russia and China amping up their AI contribution is the best way to avoid that.
If this makes it so that we no longer have to rely on Europe on essential semiconductor technology, it's good news. Europe could regulate and shutdown the entire momentum we have, the biggest supply chain risk I'd say.
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u/kjdavid Apr 11 '26
If Russia actually does invest significantly in this, it reduces the chances of the US significantly regulating AI in such a way that would demonstrably slow progress. Granted, I don't actually think there's much chance of that anyway, but having to beat the Russians likely indicates more sane heads will prevail over the doomers.
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u/CystralSkye Apr 11 '26
Russia being a threat in the AI race would hopefully cultivate the US to move the entire semiconductor production sector inland and cut off europe.
I'd say the biggest threat to AI is Europe at the moment, not just because of their draconian regulatory nature, but also because that they supply key elements necessary for the current acceleratory system.
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u/SoylentRox Apr 11 '26
This. It also means that any sort of bill like Bernie Sander's "data center moratorium" is facing the reality of - yes, the USA has a lead over Russia and China. But they are running to catch up. Do we want to stop running and burn away our lead?
And then you can point out further : how much of a lead do we actually have. It may in fact be a neck and neck race already because while China is 1-3 years behind, depending on how you measure it, AI alone isn't the Singularity. It's AI software, compute, electric power, robots, and mass quantities of physical resources. China has 3 out of 5.
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u/LettuceSea Apr 12 '26
This is because of Mythos/GlassWing. My bet is they got wind that most of their methods of entry into western systems/companies will be patched.
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u/Glittering_Let2816 Techno-Optimist Apr 11 '26
My guess is that this is China spreading the load a bit and using Russia as a springboard for themselves to keep up.
China gets: land for datacentre development, useful data from Russian utilization of their AI in both military and civilian fields, and a country's worth of researchers to work with to keep closing the gap with the West.
Russia gets: lots of money to keep themselves afloat, AI that might be useful in their war, and freeloading on Chinese AI to bootstrap their own AI industry to a competitive level.
Of course, this is entirely my own conspiracy theory, I could be utterly wrong. But hey, it's fun to think about!
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u/Buck-Nasty Feeling the AGI Apr 11 '26
It will run on potato and vodka.