• Russia has touted its leading LLM, GigaChat MAX, as part of a national AI strategy.
• But the model is "unremarkable" and lags behind US and Chinese offerings, AI experts told BI.
• While the war in Ukraine has stunted development, Moscow may still be developing military AI.

Russian President Vladimir Putin wants his country to compete in the global race to build AI, besting models coming out of China and the US. But its flagship large language model, or LLM, isn't even the best at speaking Russian.

On the Russian-language version of LLM Arena — where users go to compare and rank the answers of different LLMs — GigaChat MAX comes joint-eighth at the time of writing, behind various versions of Claude, DeepSeek, and ChatGPT.

YandexGPT 4 Pro, an LLM developed by the Russian search engine Yandex, is even lower, at joint 18th.

On the English-language version, neither appears in the ranking of more than 170 LLMs.

GigaChat MAX was developed by Russia's state-majority-owned Sberbank. When its latest iteration launched in November, its Moscow-based lead developer, Evgeny Kosarev, said on LinkedIn that it was "close to GPT4o in quality on Russian and English."

But experts have told Business Insider that, despite Putin emphasizing AI development as a crucial avenue for Russian foreign policy, GigaChat MAX is months behind American and Chinese competitors. The country's war against Ukraine has also drained it of expertise.

Spokespeople for GigaChat MAX and Yandex did not respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

An 'unremarkable' model

For now, GigaChat MAX, Russia's most developed LLM, is "unremarkable," Lukasz Olejnik, a visiting senior research fellow in cybersecurity at the War Studies department at King's College, London, told BI.

On "benchmarks" — standardized tests for AI effectiveness — the models' scores "are much lower," he said, adding that they don't surpass any of the cutting-edge, or "frontier," models, and don't involve any particular innovation.

Ben Dubow, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis and CTO of data-analysis firm Omelas, added that GigaChat MAX lacked an edge in many ways.

While it handles math well, in the Russian language it is far behind most leading Western and Chinese LLMs on some benchmarks, Dubow wrote in The Moscow Times in January.

He said that leading LLMs developed in the US were a year ahead of GigaChat MAX's current level on the industry-standard "Massive Multitask Language Understanding," or MMLU, which tests an LLM's general knowledge and problem-solving ability in text-based answers across a huge range of subjects.

Dubow also told BI that most AIs are being held to more advanced benchmarks, with MMLU "almost considered passé at this point."

"Besting American and Chinese models on Russian language prompts is a top priority for the Russian government's AI strategy, but MAX has not achieved that," Dubow said.

The war in Ukraine is holding Russia's AI development back

Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly emphasized the importance of AI, including at a December conference where he touted GigaChat MAX and said Russia was ready to assist other nations with developing AI.

Samuel Bendett, a specialist in Russian military technology at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told BI that AI was "a status thing" for Russia.

But per a global AI ranking produced by UK media startup Tortoise Media, Russia is the only one out of the five "great power" countries — the US, China, France, the UK, and Russia — not at the top of the list. Russia is ranked 31st.

Bendett named several factors holding Moscow's AI sector back.

Russia's private sector is too small to foster real competition, with almost everything government-supported, he said.

Although Sberbank is increasingly casting itself as a technology company, "there is no equivalent to OpenAI and Microsoft or Google or Huawei or Alibaba," he continued.

Additionally, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has isolated it from both global expertise and collaboration, as well as access to tech like microchips necessary to train and run complex AI models efficiently.

"The story of the Russian AI industry is, in a lot of ways, Putin's expansionism undermining Russia's global standing," said Dubow.

2014 — when Russia annexed Crimea — was a transformative year for AI in the West and China.

Meanwhile, 2022, the year Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, was the year ChatGPT launched, sparking the generative AI boom.

The war in Ukraine accelerated a major brain drain from Russia, according to Dubow.

Bendett added that Russia lacks "hundreds of thousands" of high-tech researchers, although he said that he believed many of the "tech refugees" who left Russia to avoid the draft have started to trickle back.

Putin acknowledged the problems last year, blaming "unfriendly countries" for the roadblocks and vowing to increase the number of people graduating in AI technology to more than 15,000 a year by 2030, Russia's TASS news agency reported, citing government documents.

The report said just 3,000 graduated in 2022.

By comparison, the US had more than 73,000 graduates in AI-related fields in 2023, the majority of whom were international talent, according to the Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

Serhii Kupriienko, CEO of Swarmer, a Ukrainian startup specializing in AI-based systems, told BI that over the next decade, the US and China's LLMs will help them scale their economies "exponentially" by boosting productivity across various sectors, creating jobs in AI, and speeding up innovation.

Meanwhile, Russia's struggles with AI mean its likeliest path forward is to "be subordinate to China and rely on what China's producing," Dubow said.

The 'holy grail for AI' could boost Russia's military

The Kremlin's repeated public statements on AI and the ongoing war in Ukraine have led some analysts to conclude Russia may be secretly developing a dual-use LLM with military applications.

In 2022, a Russian official announced the creation of a department for developing AI within the defense ministry.

"Russia envisions AI as a transformative tool for its military," Saratoga Foundation military analysts Timothy Thomas and Glen Howard wrote in a February review of Russian writings on military AI.

Vitaliy Goncharuk, who chaired Ukraine's AI Committee between 2019 and 2022, believes Russia may be training its AI on the vast amounts of battlefield data being generated in Ukraine.

Telegram posts and channels, drone footage, satellite imagery, sound sensors, civilian reports, and hacked material from Ukraine's Delta cloud-based management system — which feeds Ukrainian commanders with battlefield data — all provide ample material, Goncharuk said.

AI developed on this would not only help Russia improve its precision in identifying targets but also help it plan its decision-making and real-time front-line operations, Goncharuk said. It could even predict Ukraine's future decision-making and future battlefield operations, he added.

Ukraine, too, has gathered vast quantities of battlefield data from three years of war — something that is "truly the holy grail of training your AI models and systems on battlefield target recognition and selection," Bendett told BI.

It would be difficult to imagine Russia not quietly also using this data, he added.

"They constantly hint at that," he said.

• A passenger jet collided with a Black Hawk helicopter near Reagan Washington National Airport.
• Four crew members and 60 passengers were aboard the jet, and three were aboard the helicopter.
• President Donald Trump said there were no survivors.

Sixty-seven people are presumed dead after an American Airlines flight crashed into a military helicopter Wednesday night during the jet's final approach to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

President Donald Trump confirmed there had been no survivors, calling the crash "a dark and excruciating night" for the country.

American Eagle Flight 5342, operated by PSA Airlines and flying from Wichita, Kansas, was on approach to land at the airport when it struck a UH-60 Black Hawk, officials said. Several federal agencies, including the National Transportation Safety Board, are investigating the crash.

A NTSB spokesperson told Business Insider in an email on Thursday evening that the "cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder," known as black boxes, were recovered from the Bombardier CRJ700 passenger jet.

"The recorders are at the NTSB labs for evaluation," the spokesperson said.

Meanwhile, crews are still searching the waters as part of the investigation and recovery efforts, while boats remain on the scene for security and search operations, according to the DC Fire and EMS Department.

"Our divers have searched all areas that are accessible," a statement from the department read Thursday night. On Friday, the statement said, "divers will work with NTSB to conduct additional searches to locate aircraft components, to support the investigation, and begin operations to salvage the aircraft.

Three Army crewmembers were aboard the Black Hawk from Bravo Company, 12th Aviation Battalion at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, whose identities will be withheld until their next of kin have been notified, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a Thursday morning video.

"It was a fairly experienced crew, and that was doing a required annual night evaluation," he said in the video. "They did have night vision goggles."

He said investigators deployed Wednesday night and that the 12th Aviation Battalion has an "operational pause on contingency missions" for 48 hours.

"We anticipate that the investigation will quickly be able to determine whether the aircraft was in the quarter at the right altitude at the time of the incident."

At the Thursday morning press conference, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that both aircraft had been flying in a "standard pattern" that was not unusual, with no breakdown in communication between them.

"The helicopter was aware that there was a plane in the area," he said.

Duffy added that the fuselage of the American Airlines plane was inverted in the water.

"It's been located in three different sections," he said. "It's in about waist-deep water."

A livestream taken from the Kennedy Center by EarthCam showed an explosion as the helicopter collided with the passenger plane.

A spokesperson for US Figure Skating, the country's governing body for the sport, told BI that "several members" of the organization were aboard the flight.

"These athletes, coaches, and family members were returning home from the National Development Camp held in conjunction with the US Figure Skating Championships in Wichita, Kansas," the spokesperson said.

She added: "We are devastated by this unspeakable tragedy and hold the victims' families closely in our hearts."

Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, said Russian nationals were aboard the flight, according to the Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti.

At a press conference Thursday morning, Trump said he didn't know what caused the crash before laying out a series of diversity initiatives within the FAA that he suggested without evidence could have contributed to the crash.

In a video posted to the American Airlines website, CEO Robert Isom said the airline was "cooperating fully" with the NTSB's investigation of the crash.

"Anything we can do, we are doing, and right now, that means focusing on taking care of all passengers and crew involved, as well as their families," he said.

Isom said that the plane's pilot had six years of experience with PSA, and the first officer had almost two years.

Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport was closed to all aircraft after the crash and reopened around 11 a.m.

United Airlines and Southwest Airlines said they were allowing passengers booked on flights to the airport to change their travel plans without fees.

Anthony Brickhouse, an aviation expert, told BI that the crash was tragic but that he was not surprised it happened.

"We've had so many close calls with runway incursions and commercial flights almost colliding, and when something repeats over and over again, we call that a trend," he said.

"We've been trending in this direction for two or three years now, and unfortunately, tonight, it happened," he added.

Several near misses have taken place in recent years, in cities such as Austin and New York.

But this marks the first major commercial plane crash in the US since 2009, when Colgan Air Flight 3407 crashed over Buffalo, New York, killing 49 on board and one person on the ground.

Kathleen Bangs, an aviation safety analyst and former pilot, told BI that she used to fly into Reagan Washington National Airport as a regional airline pilot and that the "extremely busy" airport had challenging flying conditions, including two runways of 5,000 feet and 5,200 feet, and proximity to water.

"The conversation now will be what safety steps need to be modified to ensure there's never another similar collision in the nation's capital," she said.

This was the third major plane crash worldwide since December.

An Azerbaijan Airlines Embraer plane crashed last month, with some blaming Russian air defenses. Thirty-eight people died.

A few days later, a Boeing 737 operated by the South Korean carrier Jeju Air crashed in South Korea, killing 179 people. Two people survived.

• Firestorms in Los Angeles have burned nearly 27,000 acres, destroying homes and killing five people.
• One of the biggest blazes, the Palisades Fire, could be the costliest in US history.
• The fires have spread so fast in part because of a windstorm and flood-drought whiplash.

All was well in Los Angeles at around 10 a.m. on Tuesday.

Less than 24 hours later, 2,925 acres of the Pacific Palisades were ablaze in what is being called the worst wildfire in Southern California since 2011. It has grown by orders of magnitude since.

Several more blazes have ignited in the area, with one, the Eaton Fire, engulfing another 10,600 acres.

Firefighters had not contained the fires as of early Thursday morning, the Los Angeles Fire Department said. On Wednesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom told CNN that five people were dead, and "likely more."

More than 1,000 structures have burned and the fires could get even worse.

California is no stranger to fires, but this situation is different and especially dangerous for a few reasons.

An 'urban firestorm' that could be the costliest in history

Few brush fires in California history have intruded into such vast areas of dense, urban housing.

The UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain called it an "urban firestorm" as he assessed live images of the developing Eaton Fire on Tuesday morning.

Perhaps the best historical comparison is the 1991 Tunnel Fire, which raged through more than 1,500 acres of Oakland, but it was smaller than either of the two giant blazes in Los Angeles. It killed 25 people and injured 150, and ranks as the third-deadliest and third-most-destructive fire in California history.

The true toll of this week's fires won't be clear until later.

Swain said that he and several colleagues have estimated that the Palisades Fire could be the costliest on record in the US because of the number of structures burning and the fact that those homes are some of the most expensive in the world.

"We are looking at what is, I think, likely to become the costliest wildfire disaster in California, if not national history, along with a number of other superlatives," Swain said.

A historic windstorm spread the fire fast

A powerful windstorm buffeted the flames throughout Tuesday and into Wednesday morning, with gusts of wind reaching up to 90 miles an hour, according to the National Weather Service.

During a 2 ½ hour period overnight, the Palisades Fire's size more than doubled, per the fire service's reports.

The winds were so powerful on Tuesday evening that water- and retardant-dropping aircraft could not fly.

It's a phenomenon that scientists have warned about: a deadly combination of high winds and dry, open land — such as the brushland now being swept by flames in Los Angeles — amounting to fires that move faster than emergency responders can keep up with.

"It's certainly unusual how fast it's grown," Douglas Kelley, a researcher at the UK's Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, told Business Insider. "It's definitely a lot faster than I guess a lot of people were expecting in the area at the time."

A study published in Science in October found that while only about 3% of US fires over a nearly two-decade period could be considered "fast fires," they caused disproportionate damage.

"The most destructive and deadly wildfires in US history were also fast," wrote the study's authors, led by University of Colorado Boulder's Jennifer Balch.

Between 2001 and 2020, fast fires accounted for 78% of fire-destroyed buildings and a full 61% of suppression costs — or $18.9 billion, the scientists wrote. And they are getting more frequent, the study said.

The windstorm was bad luck. But the other primary factor in the fires' rapid explosions — the fuel — is strongly linked to the climate crisis.

Weather whiplash made abundant fire fuel

Southern California has experienced heavy rainfall and flooding the past two winters — which is a huge part of the problem.

Abundant rainfall spurred an explosion of grasses and brush, the primary fire fuel in Southern California. Then, with very little rainfall in the past few months, all that vegetation was flash-dried.

Kelley said those dry conditions made the Palisades especially susceptible to a fast-spreading fire.

This is part of a growing phenomenon that Swain calls "hydroclimate whiplash," or weather whiplash. As global temperatures rise, many parts of the world, especially California, are seeing more violent swings between extreme wet and extreme dry conditions.

The same confluence of weather whiplash and extreme winds was behind the Camp Fire, Swain said. That November 2018 blaze in Paradise, California, was the deadliest and most destructive in the state's history, destroying 18,804 structures and killing 85 people.

• The downfall of Assad has threatened Russia's military presence in Syria along with its wider strategic objectives.
• Russia's bases in Syria made it a major diplomatic player in the Middle East.
• The bases were also crucial for its activities in Africa.

The fall of Bashar Assad has thrown Russia's military presence in Syria into question. It also poses a threat to Russia's ability to project power throughout the Middle East and beyond.

On Sunday, Syrian rebels, led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, overthrew Syria's longtime autocratic ruler.

It followed a dizzying two-week campaign that caught the world off guard and many are now trying to work out what will come next for the country.

Russia has been a close ally of Syria and has leases on two military bases in the country, giving it a strategic foothold in the Middle East.

"It hits them hard," Edmund Fitton-Brown, a senior advisor to the Counter Extremism Project, said of Russia.

He added: "Syria has been their most reliable Arab ally."

A springboard to power

In 2017, Syria granted Russia a 49-year lease on the Hmeimim air base and the Tartus naval base, in return for military assistance.

Russia has used the bases to project power in the Mediterranean and into Africa, and as a counter to NATO's southern flank.

"These bases are the most important bases outside the direct sphere of Russian influence," Andreas Krieg, a Gulf specialist at the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies at King's College London, told Business Insider.

Ann Marie Dailey, a geopolitical strategist at RAND, told BI that despite its massive landmass, Russia "doesn't have great geography for power projection."

"It doesn't have warm water ports that have direct access to the oceans," she added. "And so having a port in the Mediterranean is incredibly strategically useful."

Hmeimim, meanwhile, gives Russia a refueling base and overflight access throughout the Middle East and on to Africa, she said.

On Sunday, Ukrainian military intelligence said that Russia had pulled two ships from Tartus, and had transferred weapons from Hmeimim.

BI was unable to independently verify the report.

But satellite images captured by Planet Labs PBC show Russian warships that had been seen in Tartus earlier this month were gone as of Monday.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Russia intended to have serious discussions with future Syrian authorities about access to the bases, but that it is too soon for now.

The potential loss of influence in Syria is not just about state power. The bases have also allowed support for the activities of the Russian paramilitary group Wagner.

"If you look at the Wagner footprint in Africa, you can tell that it's been enabled by the fact that they have that access in Syria to support those operations," said Dailey.

According to the Institute for the Study of War, losing the bases in Syria will "immediately" interrupt Wagner's rotation and resupply efforts.

Russia's ambitions for global leadership

Russia's involvement in Syria is a legacy of the Soviet era when the USSR traditionally maintained strong ties with other socialist states.

Russia propped up the Assad regime for more than a decade, notably sending aid during the 2011 Arab Spring, and troops and weapons to help counter the uprising in 2015.

Russian President Vladimir Putin had many reasons to stick his neck out for Assad.

"By backing Assad, Russia positioned itself as an indispensable player in regional politics, thereby increasing its diplomatic leverage," said Ali Bilgic, a professor in international relations and Middle East politics at the UK's Loughborough University.

But the huge cost of invading Ukraine appears to have forced Russia to choose between the two.

It "really speaks to how stretched thin Russian forces are," according to Dailey.

Putin has based Russia's international stature on the idea it can play a major role in different parts of the world, said Cristian Nitoiu, a Russia-focused lecturer in diplomacy and foreign affairs, also at Loughborough University.

Yet Putin's refusal to help Assad this time "basically shows that Russia was unable to support one of its long-lasting friends," Nitoiu said.

"The events in Syria can be seen as a sort of strategic failure on the part of Russia, and the optics look really bad," he added.

An uncertain future

In a statement on Sunday, Russia's foreign ministry said it was maintaining contact with "all" Syrian opposition groups, adding that while Russia's Syrian bases are on high alert, there's no serious threat to their security at the moment.

Russia has called Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham a terror group — so the fact that they are communicating with rebel groups now "demonstrates the importance of these bases," Dailey said.

HTS is also designated a terror group by the US and the UN.

What the US does regarding events in Syria will also be pivotal to what sort of foothold Russia can maintain, Loughborough University's Bilgic said.

On Saturday, President-elect Donald Trump posted on Truth Social: "THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!"

Should the US withdraw all involvement, Russia could exploit any ensuing power vacuum. But "this scenario appears improbable," Bilgic said.

In fact, diminishing Russian influence in Syria is a huge strategic draw for the US, he said, adding that there is also a concern that a new Russia-backed government could give room to ISIS, as well as threats to Israeli security.

Russia's presence in Syria has also helped it shape its objectives in energy markets, Bilgic said.

"Economically, the Tartus base played a role in Russia's energy strategy, helping to counter competing projects like the Qatar-Turkey pipeline," he said.

A grim reminder

What has happened in Syria in recent days may lead to some sleepless nights in Russia.

"I think it will rattle some folks in the Kremlin to see just how quickly Russia's military had to withdraw," Dailey said.

Assad's fall may also be a grim reminder for those in power in Russia of the necessity of crushing domestic resistance quickly, she said.

"Anyone in the Kremlin, because they've studied Russian history, knows that an autocratic regime can crumble very quickly."