Russia's biggest financial conglomerate Sber announced the launch of its conversational artificial intelligence app GigaChat as a rival to ChatGPT, joining the artificial intelligence chatbot race.
The main advantage of the Russian chat robot over ChatGPT, according to the company's press release, is that it supports multimodal interaction and communicates more intelligently in Russian.
Sber CEO German Gref, who has taken the lead of the company's digital transformation in recent years, noted the progress of the chat bot launch for the Russian technology sector.
"The innovation of Sber that we presented today is a breakthrough for the vast universe of Russian technologies," Gref pointed out.
Other feature of the chatbot, according to the press release, include a built-in Kandinsky 2.1 model that gives the neural network the skill to create images from the textual description.
Sber believes that the new neural network is perfect for media representatives, editors, programmers, teachers, students, marketers, and other professionals and, in the future, GigaChat will also be available to developers and businesses for use via a cloud API.
"Moreover, GigaChat is unique in its open architecture, while the global analogs of our model stick to the Closed AI course," the Sber CEO underlined. "It is important that GigaChat can be used not only by mass users who like to experiment with innovation but also by students and even researchers for serious scientific work."
Earlier in April, China's Alibaba unveiled its AI technology, which should become the basis for an analog of ChatGPT. At the same time, SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk confirmed that he plans to create a "third version" of ChatGPT and join the race to train AI.
ChatGPT, developed by artificial intelligence research company OpenAI, was rolled out at the end of 2022 and in just five days gained over a million users, a feat that took the social network Facebook ten months and the streaming platform Netflix three years to achieve.