While managers pay for ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro, Alibaba has quietly built one of the most powerful — and free — AI ecosystems in the world. Qwen (pronounced “chwen”, from 通义千问 – “A Thousand Questions”) had, by March 2026, surpassed all Western competitors in download counts and become a tool every manager should know — especially if cost or data control has ever been on the agenda.
Read more
A year and a half ago, I wrote a note on my personal blog about something I was noticing in my colleagues’ work and in my own: the more you trust AI, the less often you ask yourself “is this actually right?” I was drawing on a Microsoft study at the time – it showed that trust in AI suppresses critical evaluation of the answers it produces. The argument felt strong to me, but it had an obvious flaw: correlation, not causation.
In February 2026, Anthropic researchers Judy Shen and Alex Tamkin published an experiment that closed that gap. Randomized control. Concrete data. And a conclusion that, I think, most people who’ve read about it have misunderstood.
Because this isn’t a story about AI making us dumber. It’s a story about how exactly we use it.
DeepSeek is a Chinese AI startup that has become one of the industry’s leading players in just two years. By February 2026, DeepSeek proved it can compete with ChatGPT and Claude in response quality while costing 10–30 times less.
GigaChat is a generative AI model from Sber – Russia’s largest bank and technology conglomerate (comparable to a combination of Chase, Google, and Amazon in the Russian market). GigaChat is built specifically for Russian-language audiences and trained on Russian data, with deep understanding of cultural context, slang, and the nuances of the Russian language. It works without a VPN from Russia and CIS countries.
YandexGPT is a family of generative language models from Yandex, available through Alice, Yandex Browser, the Yandex Cloud API, and other ecosystem services. By February 2026, Yandex introduced the new Alice AI model family, which together with YandexGPT forms a powerful platform for working with the Russian language.
Grok by Elon Musk’s xAI is an AI system that stands out from competitors (ChatGPT, Claude) with minimal content filters and direct real-time access to X (Twitter) data. By February 2026, Grok has evolved beyond a chatbot into a full agent ecosystem deeply integrated into Tesla vehicles.
Gemini is Google’s generative AI ecosystem, which by February 2026 has become a key tool for companies deeply integrated with Google services. Its main advantage is seamless integration with Google Workspace (Docs, Sheets, Gmail, Drive) and instant access to real-time data through Google Search.
In 2026, Anthropic ships updates every two weeks – and each one shifts the boundaries of what an AI assistant can do. Opus 4.6 launched on February 5, Sonnet 4.6 on February 17, and on April 16 – the new flagship Claude Opus 4.7 with improved coding and high-precision image recognition. A context window of 1 million tokens is now available to all users at no extra cost.
By 2026, calling ChatGPT just a “chatbot” feels off. It’s a working platform with several models, search, deep research, an agent mode, image generation, Codex for development and Sora for video. And precisely because of that, newcomers find it harder to grasp the main thing: what among all of this does an ordinary manager actually need, and what still matters only to power users and tech teams.
This version of the article is updated as of April 8, 2026: I’ve removed the models and tariffs that no longer apply, double-checked launch dates and kept only the changes that truly affect day-to-day work.
On 11 February 2026, at a government meeting, President Tokayev publicly criticised KazLLM. The model, launched with great fanfare in December 2024, has just 600,000 users – 3% of the country’s population. For comparison: 2.6 million people in Kazakhstan use ChatGPT. The president was blunt: KazLLM “cannot compete with ChatGPT.”
This statement cuts to the heart of the matter. Why does Kazakhstan need its own language model if global solutions work better? And if sovereign AI is necessary – why is it losing?
The answer is more complicated than it seems. Because KazLLM is not “Kazakhstan’s ChatGPT.” It’s a fundamentally different tool with a different mission. Comparing them is like comparing a national power plant with an imported household appliance.