Yandex open-sources AliceAI Foundation 80B-A3B, a from-scratch Russian base model under Apache 2.0
Yandex
Yandex published the weights of AliceAI-Foundation-80B-A3B-Base, a mixture-of-experts base model trained from scratch (80B total, ~3B active parameters) under the Apache 2.0 license. In its own benchmarks it beats the much larger DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Base (284B, 13B active) on factuality tests including WikiWebFacts (86.5 vs 83.2) and HardMultiQA, and matches Alibaba's Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-Base on olympiad math. Yandex positions it as an experimental testbed for the architecture of a future unified reasoning model that will ground Alice AI's agentic features.
Why it matters
The first major open, commercially-licensed Russian base model trained without foreign components; its permissive release and strong benchmark showing against DeepSeek and Nvidia models is a milestone for a sovereign Russian AI stack.
Importance: 3/5
Major open-weights release from Yandex, official HF repo plus 3 media outlets; related to yesterday's Yandex pretrain release