MOSCOW, April 13Domestic neural networks can become analogues of popular Western services, said Dmitry Ivankov, an expert at the Center for Artificial Intelligence at SKB Kontur. At the same time, Sberbank and Yandex told the agency that their products in this area have already aroused considerable interest among users.
«There is no doubt that domestic developments can replace popular Western neural networks. It may take some time to catch up with Western colleagues in terms of the quality of the result, but any conceptual barriers are not visible. As an additional factor in favor of Russian developments, limiting user access to interfaces of foreign analogues,» Ivankov believes.
Two domestic developments — Kandinsky 2.1 from Sberbank and Masterpiece from Yandex — fueled the interest of Russians in artificial intelligence and neural networks, representatives of both companies noted. This is facilitated by the trend towards diffusion neural networks that create images based on a text query.
«We are seeing a very strong response from users to this technology — immediately after the launch of our «Masterpiece» application for generating images, where users can not only make their own pictures, but also look at the work of others participants,» said Alexander Krainov, director for the development of artificial intelligence technologies at Yandex. According to him, competition will benefit both users and companies.
According to Sber AI, since the launch of the new version of Kandinsky 2.1 on April 4, the model has created more than 10 million images. Moreover, the neural network is used not only in Russia, but also abroad: “The model is successfully being implemented on foreign ML platforms, such as replicate.com and FUUPS.AI,” said Andrey Kuznetsov, Executive Director of Sber AI for Data Research.
Ivankov noted that the companies presented neural networks with a difference of several days, and this aroused interest among the audience: “I am sure that everyone was interested in trying and comparing the results of both networks.” He added that the use of both services does not require special programming skills, and this simplifies access for a wide audience — you can use the models through the website, the chat bot in Telegram or the application.
The popularity of neural networks in the coming years will grow, the expert believes. «The growth in the number of real implementations and ways of using it will eventually lead to the fact that the technology will become as commonplace for most people as mobile communications or the Internet. While AI is more of a convenient tool, which I would recommend to master for all such specialists (copywriters and designers — ed.) to increase its relevance in the industry,” he added.