Yandex

Yandex is a Russian internet company, operator of the dominant Russian search engine, and the developer of the YaLM-100B and YandexGPT lines of large language models. It published YaLM-100B under Apache 2.0 in June 2022, a release the company described as the largest GPT-like model then openly available, and its closed YandexGPT line has powered the Alice voice assistant since 2023.²⁴ The trajectory parallels Baidu's in China: a national search champion whose machine-learning infrastructure and home-language data gave it a head start on generative models for its home market.

Stated mission and record

Yandex's corporate site states its mission as "helping you solve your problems and reach your goals," describes search as "a universal assistant, a navigator for life," and adds: "User happiness is our goal: positivity and ease of use mean more to us than monetization."⁷ Generative models sit inside that assistant framing (the site lists YandexGPT and YandexART, both from 2023), and the company publishes no separate AI charter or frontier-safety framework as of July 2026.⁷

The record shows movement in both directions. Toward the mission: free Russian-language consumer AI at scale through Alice and search, the permissively licensed YaLM-100B release, open YandexGPT 5 Lite weights in 2025, and education programs such as the School of Data Analysis, run since 2007.²⁵⁷ In tension with the user-first framing: the EU's 2022 sanctions decisions stated that Yandex promoted pro-government narratives after Russia's invasion of Ukraine; co-founder Arkady Volozh publicly called the war "barbaric," and the EU removed him from its list in March 2024.¹² Separately, the flagship YandexGPT models remain closed, and the open Lite weights ship under Yandex's own license rather than the Apache 2.0 terms of the 2022 release.⁵

History

The Yandex search engine went live on September 23, 1997, built by co-founders Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich; Segalovich coined the name as shorthand for "yet another indexer," and the company was incorporated in 2000 with Volozh as chief executive.⁸ Yandex grew into Russia's leading internet firm, spanning maps, ride-hailing, e-commerce, and cloud, and reported a 66.4 percent share of Russian search for Q4 2024.⁷ Its Alice voice assistant (Alisa in Russian), launched on October 10, 2017, was marketed as the first conversational assistant designed for the Russian market and later became the main consumer surface for the company's language models.¹

Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine reshaped the company's structure. The EU sanctioned deputy CEO Tigran Khudaverdyan in March 2022 (Artem Savinovsky became general director of the main Russian subsidiary, Yandex LLC, that April) and sanctioned Volozh in June 2022, stating that Yandex promoted pro-government narratives; Volozh resigned as chief executive of the Dutch parent Yandex N.V. the same week, later called the war "barbaric," and was delisted in March 2024.¹² In February 2024, Yandex N.V. agreed to sell all of the group's Russia-based businesses to a consortium of senior Yandex managers and outside investors for 475 billion rubles (about $5.2 billion), a price reflecting the mandatory 50 percent discount Russia imposes on sellers from states it designates "unfriendly";⁶ the sale completed in two closings, the second announced as completed on July 15, 2024.¹³ The remaining international company renamed itself Nebius Group in August 2024.¹⁰ The Russian business continued under a new Moscow-listed holding company, with Savinovsky serving as chief executive of both the holding company and Yandex LLC as of July 2026.⁹

Model program

Yandex's YaLM ("Yet another Language Model") family was already used, by the company's count, in over 20 services including search and Alice before the June 2022 publication of YaLM-100B: a 100-billion-parameter GPT-style transformer trained for 65 days on 800 NVIDIA A100 GPUs over 1.7 terabytes of English and Russian text, including the Pile, released under Apache 2.0.²³ The company called it "the largest GPT-like model in the public domain" at release; Meta's 175-billion-parameter OPT weights were then gated behind a research license, and the 176-billion-parameter BLOOM followed in July 2022 under a use-restricted license.²

YandexGPT launched in May 2023 as a closed successor line, integrated into Alice from day one (invoked with "Alice, let's get creative!"), with YandexGPT 2 following in September 2023 and YandexGPT 3 in April 2024.⁴ YandexGPT 5 (February 2025) split the line into a closed Pro flagship and a Lite tier whose 8-billion-parameter pretrained weights Yandex published on Hugging Face: a Llama-like architecture with a 32,000-token context window, trained on 15 trillion tokens plus a 320-billion-token "Powerup" stage, with a tokenizer the company says encodes Russian text in roughly a third fewer tokens than Qwen2.5.⁵ Instruct and GGUF variants followed, and the company's Hugging Face organization also hosts "Alchemist" fine-tunes of Stable Diffusion models, eleven model repositories in all as of July 2026.¹¹ Capability claims are benchmarked primarily on Russian-language tasks and carry developer attribution.

See also

• Baidu
• Aleph Alpha

References