Saiga

Saiga is a family of Russian-language instruction-tuned models maintained by Ilya Gusev, among the most widely used open Russian chat models. Builds such as saiga_llama3_8b start from Meta's Llama 3 8B Instruct and add several rounds of supervised fine-tuning and preference optimization (KTO) on Russian datasets including the curated saiga_scored collection.

The models use a Russian system prompt identity ("Sayga, Russian-language automatic assistant") and are a staple baseline in Russian LLM benchmarks and community fine-tuning work. Licensing follows the base model (Llama 3 community license for the Llama-based builds), so commercial use inherits Meta's terms.