Sber has launched two new flagship MoE models in its GigaChat series, Ultra Preview and Lightning, both of which have been trained from scratch for Russian language tasks.
Alongside these innovative models, Sber also introduced GigaAM-v3, the next generation of its open speech recognition technology, enhanced with advanced punctuation handling and text normalization capabilities.
Furthermore, all image and video generation models from the latest Kandinsky 5.0 family, Video Pro, Video Lite, and Image Lite, are now publicly available.
These advanced models provide native Russian prompt understanding, incorporate specific knowledge for the Russian cultural context, and robustly generate Cyrillic text in both images and videos.
Additionally, the K-VAE 1.0 models for encoding and decoding visual content, critical for training visual generation neural networks and among the best open-source models globally, have been released. The code and weights for all these models are distributed under the MIT license, enabling commercial usage.
Andrey Belevtsev, Senior Vice President, Head of Technology and AI, Sberbank, said that, “We believe creating world-class artificial intelligence requires two things: massive resources and world-class R&D teams. Sber has both. But what matters most is sharing—not locking down technology. Our strategy is to become an open foundation for innovation nationwide. That’s why we’re releasing model weights.”
“This is a pivotal moment. Any company in Russia, whether a bank or startup, can install these models within their closed systems, fine-tune them on sensitive internal datasets, and retain complete control over their confidential information. This approach reflects true technological sovereignty: AI belongs to the entire nation, driving business transformations and economic growth. I would also like to note that Ultra will soon be available for corporate clients, with optimized cost of ownership for internal corporate deployments,” Belevtsev added.
Image Supplied | Cropped by GBN
Sber’s GigaChat expands with the addition of GigaChat Ultra Preview and GigaChat Lightning
Sber GigaChat Ultra Preview stands out as the largest and most powerful model in the GigaChat line-up. The first model of this scale in Russia, though still being trained, it already surpasses international benchmarks such as DeepSeek V3.1 in overall quality metrics for Russian-language performance, ranking first on the MERA benchmark. Despite its size, it maintains impressive speed, currently faster than GigaChat 2 Max, the previous flagship model.
Its sibling, GigaChat Lightning, offers the opposite balance: compact size and fast operation in an MoE model optimized for local execution on laptops while supporting rapid product iterations.
GigaAM-v3
Sber GigaAM-v3 represents five new open-source Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models designed for industrial-grade and commercial-use Russian speech processing. GigaAM-v3 supports voice assistants, contact centers, call analytics, voice message aggregators, and multimodal agents.
Kandinsky 5.0
Kandinsky 5.0 is a versatile family of visual generative models: Image Lite generates high-quality images from text prompts and supports image editing, while Video Lite and more advanced Video Pro generate video from text prompts or animate images.
Kandinsky 5.0 unlocks new opportunities for consumer and enterprise applications. Developers and organizations can leverage these open-access models to build tools for personalized video greetings, photo animation, and rich visual storytelling.
Creative professionals, including directors, designers, marketers, and animation artists, can rely on Kandinsky to streamline the creation of promotional materials, digital content, and commercial visual projects.
The release of Kandinsky 5.0 marks a significant milestone in the growth of an open ecosystem centered around modern Russian generative technologies, empowering users and businesses with accessible, high-quality AI-driven creative tools.
