Make Weak Model Great Again: Can Prompting Fix a Weak AI Model?
Every team has a ‘good enough’ model. Maybe it’s the one your company approved. Maybe it’s the one that runs locally because legal won’t let data leave the building. Maybe it’s the only option your country’s regulations allow.
In Russia, this is about to become very literal. In March 2026, the Ministry of Digital Development published a draft law on “trusted AI models.” If passed – enforcement is planned from September 2027 – government agencies and critical infrastructure will be limited to models from an approved registry. ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, which route data through foreign servers, could be restricted. Russian-made AI assistants would be pre-installed on devices by default.
The problem is that Russian models lag behind. In our study of 54 models, GigaChat scored 3.26 out of 5. GPT-5.4 scored 4.80. That’s a 32% gap.
If GigaChat is all Russian managers have, can smart prompting pull acceptable quality out of it?
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