Not enough GPU capacity (embargoed) and not enough local talent. Also, not enough money vs trillions the hyperscalers are burning. Their AI drones with small models are sufficiently capable, though.

Historically Russia has had very good hacking programs, coders for one very important reason - they’ve always been sanctioned to hell and their equipment therefore remains limited to older models, which made hackers and programmers get very efficient and creative with what they have - the problem is ai doesn’t go very fast with that method, you need at least for now to rely on adding more and more gpu’s to increase the speed at which you’re advancing at least in initial training. If you find your successive models resulted in one you need to fix, you have to go back and retrain, so you need to have all that equipment on hand to do it, just distilling won’t fix issues you want fixed. So they’re limited. That makes it harder to be a leader where it’s necessary to have the most powerful equipment in the highest numbers.

A bunch of their data centers just inexplicably exploded and burned down so whatever prominence they might have had until now is probably going to fade a bit more.

Yandex released an open weight 80B-A3B base model about a month or so ago. I’ve heard basically fuck all about it since then, but it’s out there…

They have some. This is the most prominant one I know:

https://huggingface.co/ai-sage

But it’s Russian state backed, so (allegedly) the govt limited what they could train on, hence it performs very poorly in English and in subjective tests in localllama.

There are many interesting efforts from around the world, but there are fewer people to test them than you’d think.

Can they even buy new nvidia servers after starting the war?

When it comes to commercial software Russia is usually competing with EU for the last place. Not a particularly great outlook.