Yandex releases 80B-parameter AI model under open license for commercial use

Yandex has built a new large language model, Alice AI Foundation, entirely from scratch and released its weights for commercial and research use, Vedomosti reported. The company says the model contains 80 billion parameters, of which 3 billion are active, and was trained on 18 trillion tokens.

The company plans to use Alice AI Foundation to underpin a future reasoning model and agent capabilities for Alice AI. The release also positions Yandex as a developer of open-source fundamental AI models in Russia, alongside Sberbank.

Yandex describes Alice AI Foundation as a sovereign model, but Russia’s legal framework for assigning that status is still being developed. Under legislation that took effect Sept. 1, sovereign models face stricter requirements than national models and must rely entirely on domestic components. Formal registration and status assignment will begin on March 1, 2027.

The model’s development cost has not been disclosed. Industry estimates cited by Vedomosti range from roughly 150 million to 4 billion rubles, depending on what costs and stages of development are included.

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