GigaChat at Work: Getting the Most Out of Russia's Sovereign AI
GigaChat is the large language model built by Sber, Russia’s largest bank. Outside Russia almost nobody uses it. Inside, it is often the only option: banks, state agencies, defense contractors and big industrial groups run it on their own servers because Russian data-localization rules and sanctions keep ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini off the table. If you work with a Russian team, a Russian subsidiary or a client in a regulated Russian industry, this is the tool on their desk.
This guide was written for those daily users, and it reads that way: the examples are Russian contracts, Russian laws, Russian prices. For anyone else it is a useful case study in a broader problem – how to get decent work out of a “sovereign” or on-premise model that trails the frontier, because policy rather than quality decided you would use it.
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