Yandex open-sources Alice AI Search Pretrain, a compact hybrid encoder-decoder MoE model

Yandex

Models / LLM official + media 2 src. ~1 min

Yandex released Alice AI Search Pretrain on Hugging Face — the pretrain base of the model that generates AI answers in Yandex Search (finetuned version live since July, used by 49M monthly users). It is a 35B-parameter model with a hybrid encoder-decoder + Mixture-of-Experts architecture activating only ~0.6B parameters per token, trained from scratch; in blind tests it answered Russian tasks better than compact rivals like Qwen 3.5 2B/4B.

Why it matters

First open release of Yandex's sovereign from-scratch search LLM, giving researchers access to a hybrid architecture that is unusually compute-efficient and strong in Russian.

Importance: 3/5

Open-weights release of Yandex's production search model, official repo + media coverage

yandex open-weights mixture-of-experts encoder-decoder search alice

Sources

official yandex/AliceAI-T5-35B-A0.6B on Hugging Face

media Yandex open-sourced its sovereign language model (Naked Science)