A New Era Begins: The First Child Saved by Personalized CRISPR Therapy

This isn’t just another milestone in DNA editing technology. It’s a landmark moment that signals the beginning of a new era: personalized, genetically-targeted medicine. These are treatments created for a specific person, for their unique mutation, for their precise diagnosis. This is the future of medicine, and it’s happening today. I have been enthusiastically following the development of Cas9 technology since 2012—the very protein that kicked off the era of precision DNA editing. The world later came to know this field as CRISPR, or more simply, “genetic scissors.” ...

22 May, 2025 · 2 min · 286 words · Yury Akinin

Ownership Over Orders: Why Top-Down Management Fails in Tech

There are two core approaches to management. Both can work, but one suppresses initiative while the other cultivates it. The first is the “Task + Control” model. A manager assigns a task, monitors its execution, and only requires the employee to do exactly what was asked. Initiative is not part of the equation. The second, more common in Western tech circles, is the “Area of Responsibility + Boundaries” model. Here, you don’t receive a task; you receive a domain. You are given the objective, the resources, and the strategic guardrails. What happens next is your growth zone. You apply your expertise, think critically, and take initiative. Sometimes you make mistakes. But often, you deliver a better outcome than anyone could have prescribed from the top. ...

14 May, 2025 · 2 min · 263 words · Yury Akinin

AI Startup Diary #2: The Invisible Work is What Matters Most

Over the past few days, our team has pushed through a massive amount of work on A.V.E.L.I.N. This is a crucial stage where the product changes very little on the surface, but internally, we’re implementing dozens of architectural decisions, refining core logic, and running extensive tests. A.V.E.L.I.N is learning to understand not just words, but intent. It can already select the most effective model for a given context and analyze queries from voice and video, not only text. We are intensely focused on making the interaction feel fluid and organic. ...

12 May, 2025 · 1 min · 169 words · Yury Akinin

Why AI Training Costs Millions: A Look at the 'Gigafactory of Compute'

I’m often asked which AI training project cost millions of dollars and two years of my life. People wonder: why is it so expensive? My usual answer is that it’s not particularly expensive—especially considering we don’t own our own hardware yet. Training AI has always been about massive data centers; that’s just the reality of the field. When you’re not immersed in it, the sheer scale can be hard to visualize. ...

9 May, 2025 · 2 min · 268 words · Yury Akinin

Diary of an AI Startup

This series of posts will be my way of documenting the journey of creating one of our team’s most ambitious products: the intelligent assistant, A.V.E.L.I.N. To give you some context, my development team and I are currently beta-testing the project within our Mozgii Ecosystem AI platform. Our primary focus is on A.V.E.L.I.N.—an intelligent personal assistant in Telegram built to handle both basic and complex tasks involving AI-powered search, processing, and analysis of information. ...

1 May, 2025 · 1 min · 211 words · Yury Akinin

Adhocracy in IT: The Operating System for Modern Startups

In traditional companies, everything is built on a clear hierarchy: decisions are made at the top and executed at the bottom. This approach might work in a stable environment, but for an IT startup, especially in AI, it stifles growth. IT companies need adhocracy: a management model where competence and results are valued more than titles. It’s about flexibility over bureaucracy and speed over approvals. The value of an idea is judged by its effectiveness, not by the position of its author. ...

28 April, 2025 · 1 min · 192 words · Yury Akinin

The Emerging Skill of the AI Era: Beyond Just Searching

From my experience working with neural networks, it’s become obvious how two people can interact with the same model and get radically different outcomes. This isn’t a minor variation—it signals a fundamental departure from the search engine paradigm. We have entered a new era of interacting with artificial intelligence. AI doesn’t just aggregate data; it selects and synthesizes relevant information in response to specific requests. This changes the very nature of how we engage with information. Where the key skill was once finding data in search engines, it is now the ability to correctly formulate requests to an AI. ...

25 April, 2025 · 1 min · 205 words · Yury Akinin

Why Sber and Yandex Lag Behind Global AI Leaders

I’m often asked why international AI models, like those from OpenAI, consistently outperform Russian counterparts such as GigaChat. To understand the gap, we need to look beyond the code and analyze the foundational, structural challenges. Here are the key factors limiting Russia’s position in the global AI race. 1. The Compute Bottleneck Effective AI development at scale depends on raw computational power. Since 2022, access to essential high-performance NVIDIA chips (like the A100 and H100) has been severed. Training a model on the scale of GPT-4 requires a cluster of over 10,000 GPUs—a resource capacity that simply doesn’t exist in Russia. For context, Sber’s most powerful supercomputer, Christofari Neo, operates at around 12 petaflops, making it 50 to 100 times less powerful than the world’s leading AI research centers. ...

24 April, 2025 · 2 min · 406 words · Yury Akinin

AI in Messengers: Moving Beyond Simple Bots

Messengers have long evolved past being simple tools for exchanging messages. Today, they are the space where our work, personal lives, news, and friends converge. The logical next step is to integrate an AI assistant into this environment—one that helps structure communication and interacts with you in a familiar interface, just like any other contact. A majority of the solutions on the market are bots running on simplified or free versions of GPT. They can generate answers, but often fail to provide high-quality, deep information. ...

22 April, 2025 · 2 min · 252 words · Yury Akinin

Beyond the Interface: 5 Key Differentiators of Modern AI Models

Users see a chat window. Sometimes voice, sometimes images. But behind this familiar interface lie radically different architectures and capabilities. Here are five key parameters that distinguish the top AI models in 2025: 1. Memory (Context Window) This defines how much information a model can retain within a single conversation. GPT-4o: 128k tokens (~300 pages of text) Claude 3 Opus & Gemini 2.5 Pro: Up to 1 million tokens (~2,000 pages) DeepSeek-VL Mini: ~8k tokens (~20 pages) More memory enables greater context and reduces hallucinations, but it also demands more powerful hardware. ...

19 April, 2025 · 2 min · 367 words · Yury Akinin