Gref Outed Yandex for Slapping Russian Labels on Chinese AI

Herman Gref took the stage at the Federation Council to announce that Sberbank owns the only genuine domestic neural network left in the country. According to the chief banker, rival tech giant Yandex quietly gave up on foundational training and is merely fine-tuning Qwen, an open-weight model made by Chinese giant Alibaba.

Naturally, Yandex rushed to deny the allegations, insisting that its complete in-house development cycle is alive and kicking. Even their digital assistant Alisa was enlisted to explain that Qwen is merely hosted inside their cloud infrastructure as an optional client tool, while the homegrown YandexGPT continues evolving through its fifth iteration.

The confrontation peeled back an uncomfortable reality: Russian corporate giants are choking on massive hardware deficits. The banker lamented that staying competitive requires clusters of 100,000 Nvidia B200 chips costing trillions of rubles, while Google commands over two million processors and Microsoft hoards another million.

Nothing highlights the triumphant march toward technological sovereignty quite like two state-backed monopolies publicly bickering over whose borrowed silicon runs whose Chinese open-source weights. The frantic scramble to secure nonexistent supercomputers might make for patriotic speeches, but it paints a rather grim portrait of an industry desperately pretending to sit at the global frontier.