Yandex open-sources the model behind fast SI answers in Search
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Publication time restored from the build log. . Updated: .
Russian developers have gained a free foundation for their SI products in Russian — open SI is becoming more accessible and cheaper.
The Alice AI Search Pretrain base model with 35 billion parameters, of which only about 0.6 billion are active per token, has appeared on Hugging Face — this lets it answer within seconds under enormous load. The architecture is hybrid: an encoder-decoder plus a "mixture of experts". A fine-tuned version has been answering in Yandex Search since July for more than 49 million users a month; according to the company, in Russian it is comparable to Qwen 3.5 35B at much lower cost.
Sources 2