NVIDIA's New Open-Source Models Tackle AI's Language Gap

The vast majority of AI development is concentrated in a handful of languages, leaving a significant capabilities gap for much of the world. NVIDIA is addressing this imbalance with a new suite of open-source models and tools designed to expand high-quality speech AI, with an initial focus on 25 European languages. This initiative moves beyond simply releasing models; it provides the foundational components for building localized, multilingual AI applications. The goal is to empower developers to create robust tools like multilingual chatbots, real-time translation services, and intelligent customer service bots for languages often overlooked by mainstream tech, including Croatian, Estonian, and Maltese. ...

16 August, 2025 · 2 min · 397 words · Yury Akinin

Vector Search Is Reaching Its Limits. Here’s What Comes Next.

Vector databases have become a core component in modern AI, particularly for powering retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) through similarity search. However, as we build more sophisticated applications, the limitations of relying solely on vector representations are becoming clear. From my perspective, the core issue is that advanced AI systems need to understand more than just semantic similarity. They require a richer grasp of data that includes structured attributes, textual precision, and the relationships within and across different modalities like text, images, and video. Relying on basic vector search alone creates significant blind spots. ...

13 August, 2025 · 4 min · 694 words · Yury Akinin

Google's MLE-STAR: AI Agents That Automate Machine Learning Engineering

Google’s MLE-STAR: AI Agents That Automate Machine Learning Engineering Google Cloud’s research team has unveiled MLE-STAR (Machine Learning Engineering via Search and Targeted Refinement), an AI agent system that marks a significant step toward the full automation of building ML pipelines. For anyone who has spent countless hours engineering features, selecting models, and optimizing hyperparameters, this development is worth paying close attention to. At its core, MLE-STAR moves beyond the limitations of traditional AutoML. Instead of relying on a predefined set of models and techniques, it uses an innovative approach that combines external knowledge with internal optimization. ...

4 August, 2025 · 3 min · 483 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

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