Russia's Yandex Drops a Free AI Brain to Rival DeepSeek

Yandex — Russia's answer to Google — just published a free AI model called AliceAI-Foundation-80B-A3B-Base on Hugging Face, a public site where AI models are shared. It's positioning the model as a direct rival to DeepSeek and Qwen, two Chinese models that became wildly popular this past year mainly because they're free to download and surprisingly powerful. The notable detail: Yandex says it built this from scratch rather than tweaking an existing model, which is a much harder job.

The name '80B-A3B' matters more than it looks. It means the model holds 80 billion pieces of learned knowledge — a huge library — but only switches on about 3 billion of them for any given question. Think of a giant library where only a few shelves light up at a time. That makes it fast and cheap to run, which is exactly why these 'mixture of experts' designs are spreading.

Here's the honest catch. This is a 'base' model — a raw engine, not a finished assistant. Nobody has taught it to chat politely, follow instructions, or refuse bad requests, so it's really materials for developers, not something you'd use today. It also doesn't work with Llama.cpp, the free software many people use to run AI privately on their own laptops. And because it comes from Yandex, a Russian company, questions about data handling and trust come with it.

Why should you care? More free, competing models keep pushing prices down for everyone. Businesses get cheaper options, developers get more choices, and the AI race keeps widening beyond the US and China. But a model you can't easily run, don't fully trust, and can't yet chat with is groundwork, not a product. Useful to watch — not yet useful to use.