Yandex spends 20-30 times less on artificial intelligence development than OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. This was stated by Valery Stromov, head of "Alisa and Smart Devices." According to him, last year the company allocated about 55 billion rubles just for equipment for training and operating neural networks, and the scale of investments remains comparable in 2026.
At the same time, Yandex is not trying to create the most powerful universal model in the world. Such a race requires tens of billions of dollars and, according to the company, remains the prerogative of a few global players. Instead, "Alisa AI" is being developed around specific scenarios – education, medicine, finance, shopping, and everyday tasks.
They plan to compensate for the difference in resources through a local ecosystem: their own search, product databases, and Russian services. In certain areas, such as programming, Yandex is ready to use specialized third-party models – Stromov admitted that Chinese open source can currently handle such tasks better.
The company believes that the user does not necessarily need the largest model for every query. The main goal is to make "Alisa" more useful specifically in the Russian context, even if in some complex areas it will be inferior to world leaders.
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