«Sber» has introduced a multimodal neural network GigaChat, which looks like a real Russian competitor to American ChatGPT. The artificial intelligence, based on the neural network model NeONKA (NEural Omnimodal Network with Knowledge-Awareness), answers users' questions, writes software code and even draws pictures based on text descriptions. At «Sber» it is emphasized, that GigaChat communicates in Russian more competently than ChatGPT. Which, in general, is not surprising.

The NeONKA model is already being implemented into many «Sber» products and services: the virtual assistant «Salute» will be one of the first products with all the capabilities of the new model. The company has also stated that NeONKA's ru-GPT 3.5 with 13 billion parameters will be made available in open access «in order to accelerate the development of the open-source community and technologies in the field of artificial intelligence». The model is now running in closed beta mode.