Yandex develops 80B-parameter AI model for commercial use

Yandex: Yandex is a leading Russian technology company that operates search, maps, cloud computing, e-commerce, and AI services primarily in Russia and CIS markets. It has been advancing its AI capabilities through in-house development of language models for integration into products like its virtual assistant. In this news, Yandex developed and open-sourced a new foundation AI model under a permissive license to support commercial and research applications as a base for future reasoning and agentic AI features. Open Source: The model is released under the Apache 2.0 license, enabling developers to run, fine-tune, and build upon it for both commercial and research purposes. AI Development: Yandex trained the new model entirely from scratch without using foreign components to create a sovereign foundation for its AI services. Language Strengths: The model excels particularly in Russian-language tasks involving factual knowledge, mathematics, and coding compared to other open models.