Russia's "GigaChat"
бесплатная нейросеть на русском языке, которая общается как человек
GigaChat is a generative AI chatbot developed by Sberbank, Russia’s largest financial institution, and launched in April 2023.
Positioned as a homegrown alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, it’s a key player in Russia’s drive toward technological independence amid Western sanctions and restricted access to global tech.
Designed with a focus on the Russian language and culture, GigaChat excels at understanding and generating natural, contextually rich responses in Russian—something foreign models often struggle with due to linguistic and cultural nuances.
It’s not just a chatbot; it’s a multimodal tool capable of handling text, generating images, writing code, and even assisting with analytical tasks like report creation from raw data.
Built on Sberbank’s Neural Omnimodal Network with Knowledge Awareness (NeONKA), GigaChat integrates advanced natural language processing with capabilities like image generation via the Kandinsky 2.1 model.
By early 2025, its latest iteration, GigaChat MAX, boasts 20 billion parameters and a memory of 131,000 tokens per conversation—impressive,
though it trails behind global leaders like
- Google’s Gemini 1.5 (with 2 million tokens) or
- OpenAI’s latest offerings
Sberbank claims it outperforms many open-source models in Russian-language tasks and math benchmarks, scoring 80% on the MMLU math test, but it’s still playing catch-up to American and Chinese AI giants in overall capability and scale.
ChatGPT is banned in Russia, and much of Western tech is sidelined.
Recent updates to GigaChat have added music and vocal generation, broadening its creative scope.
Costs
According to Sberbank’s developer docs, paid plans start at a minimum of 600 rubles per month (including VAT), which converts to about $6 USD at current exchange rates (roughly 100 rubles to $1 USD, though this fluctuates).
Token costs vary by model: GigaChat Lite, Pro, and Max have different rates for text generation, and there’s an additional charge for vector text representation.
For commercial or API use (like developers integrating it into apps), it’s a pay-as-you-go model, billed monthly in rubles via an offer agreement or contract.
The minimum monthly cost of 600 rubles ($6 USD) still applies, but heavy usage—say, thousands of queries—would scale up from there.
Posts on X and some web sources hint at costs potentially reaching $4.5K USD for large-scale applications (e.g., 350K-400K rubles), though that’s likely for enterprise-level deployments, not casual use.
Russia’s tech isolation—limited GPU access and talent drain—hampers development and GigaChat’s global competitiveness, yet this could change.
GigaChat is a solid tool for domestic Russian needs, but it’s not yet near a world-beater.
