Deripaska Predicts Isolated Internet And Technological Backwardness For Russia

The RF has lost the strategic race.

One of the richest Russians, founder of aluminum company Rusal Oleg Deripaska criticized the Russian authorities for "coddling" private business and preventing it from working in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), which he considers a technological revolution. "If they don't let private business in Russia work in the field of artificial intelligence and don't stop nightmarishing it, we will sleep through this next - already the fourth - technological revolution and rejoice in our sovereignty in the cave of the isolated Internet," Deripaska wrote in his Telegram channel. He said the secret to success doesn't look fantastic: long-term planning, state support, and helping national champions.

He accompanied the warning with a breakdown of the global AI race, citing a speech by the head of Nvidia Jensen Huang, the world's largest AI chip company. According to Huang, the US-China rivalry is not a ChatGPT duel with DeepSeek, but a systemic competition in fundamental areas: energy, chips, data center infrastructure, AI models and their practical applications.

The outlook for Russia looks particularly worrisome. Economic and technological isolation leaves the country on the sidelines of the global development of artificial intelligence. Thus, on the Russian-language platform LM Arena, where users evaluate the quality of AI models, the best Russian product - GigaChat from Sber - ranks only 25th, behind older versions of ChatGPT from OpenAI and Gemini from Google. YandexGPT is even lower - on the 35th position.

According to Stanford University's Global AI Vibrancy Tool rating, which measures the development and efficiency of AI ecosystems, Russia ranks 28th out of 36 countries. The International Monetary Fund's assessment is even tougher: in the index of 174 countries' readiness to implement AI, Russia ranks only 53rd with a score of 0.56 out of 1 possible. By comparison, the eurozone as a whole has 0.67, China has 0.64, Poland has 0.6, and the leaders are Singapore, Denmark, the United States, the Netherlands and Estonia.

"Russia is years behind in developing its own AI. It has already lost in this race, and it is impossible for it to catch up with the leaders," Yuri Podorozhny, the former head of Yandex.Maps and Yandex.Metro, who left the country after the war began and now works as director of AI at fintech startup Finom, told The Wall Street Journal. In 2024, all Russian AI companies attracted only about $30 million in venture capital investment, while OpenAI alone received more than $6 billion.

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