History
Yandex has developed a series of open-weights large language models called YaLM (Yet another Language Model).
On 17 May 2023, the company unveiled a neural network called YandexGPT (YaGPT) and enabled its virtual assistant Alice to interact with the new language model.
On June 15, 2023, Yandex added the YandexGPT language model to the image generation application Shedevrum. This enabled its users to create fully-fledged posts complete with a title, text, and relevant illustration.
In July 2023, YandexGPT launched new features enabling businesses to create virtual assistants and chatbots, as well as generate and structure texts.
On 7 September 2023, Yandex presented YandexGPT 2 at the Practical ML Conf.
From October 6, 2023, YandexGPT can create short retellings of online Russian-language videos on the Internet. It can summarize videos that are from two minutes to four hours long and contain speech.
On 24 October 2024, Yandex released YandexGPT 4 in Pro and Lite versions, available through the Yandex Cloud API.
On 25 February 2025, Yandex introduced YandexGPT 5 Pro and integrated it into Alice Pro chat. The company also published the pretrained YandexGPT 5 Lite model on Hugging Face.
On 31 March 2025, Yandex released YandexGPT 5 Lite Instruct, an instruction-tuned version of the pretrained model. The model weights are distributed under a custom Yandex licence.
On 28 August 2025, Yandex made YandexGPT 5.1 Pro available to business customers through the Yandex Cloud AI Studio API. At the time of the announcement, the model was also being used in Alice chat.
On 28 October 2025, Yandex introduced the Alice AI family, comprising Alice AI LLM, Alice AI VLM and Alice AI Art. A technical report published on 11 December 2025 described the development of the family, including the initialisation of Alice AI LLM training with Qwen3-235B weights.
In September 2026, Yandex released Alice AI Search Pretrain under the Apache 2.0 licence. According to the company, it has 35 billion parameters, approximately 600 million of which are active per token; a fine-tuned version, Alice AI Search, had been used in Yandex Search since July 2026.
On 21 September 2026, Yandex announced the release of AliceAI-Foundation-80B-A3B-Base under the Apache 2.0 licence. The experimental pretrained model uses a mixture-of-experts architecture with approximately 80 billion parameters, of which 3 billion are active per token.
