# Kandinsky
Kandinsky is a family of open text-to-image (and, since 2023, text-to-video) diffusion models developed by the Russian technology company Sber (Сбер)[7](https://ai-forever.github.io/KandinskyVideo/K11/). The family began with the Kandinsky 2.x releases, moved to a much larger single-stage latent diffusion design in Kandinsky 3.0 (December 2023), adopted a diffusion transformer in Kandinsky 4.1 Image, and expanded into image and video generation with the Kandinsky 5.0 line in 2025. Kandinsky is one part of Sber's AI stack alongside the [GigaChat](https://www.edgepedia.org/gigachat) assistant; the FusionBrain web app and the Kandinsky Telegram and VK bots are consumer products built on the models, and Sber the company is a separate subject. This article covers the models themselves: their architecture, training, licensing, benchmarks, and reception.
| Fact | Value |
|---|---|
| Developer | Sber (released via its ai-forever team)[1](https://github.com/ai-forever/Kandinsky-3/blob/main/README.md) |
| Kandinsky 3.0 size | 11.9B parameters total, about three times the largest prior Kandinsky model[2](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.03511) |
| Kandinsky 3.0 components | 8.6B Flan-UL2 text encoder, 3.0B denoising U-Net, 0.27B Sber-MoVQGAN decoder[2](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.03511) |
| Kandinsky 5.0 line | Image Lite 6B, Video Lite 2B, Video Pro 19B (2025)[3](https://habr.com/ru/companies/sberbank/articles/971154/) |
| License (5.0) | MIT, permitting commercial use, versus non-commercial FLUX.1 dev and restricted Stable Diffusion 3[4](https://atmoscompute.com/glossary/image-gen/kandinsky) |
| Russian-language support | Native Russian prompt understanding via Qwen2.5-VL; Cyrillic text rendering in images[4](https://atmoscompute.com/glossary/image-gen/kandinsky) |
| Availability | Hugging Face weights, GigaChat, Telegram, and VK bots, FusionBrain[5](https://aclanthology.org/anthology-files/anthology-files/pdf/emnlp/2024.emnlp-demo.48.pdf) • [6](https://www.sberbank.ru/en/press_center/all/article?blockID=1539&lang=en&newsID=403919b6-5c33-4da7-bbba-a35d533a4b34®ionID=77&type=NEWS) |
## What Kandinsky is
Kandinsky is Sber's open image generation model line, built and released by the ai-forever team. Kandinsky 3.0 is described in its release documentation as an open-source text-to-image diffusion model built upon the Kandinsky 2.x family, incorporating more data specifically related to Russian culture[1](https://github.com/ai-forever/Kandinsky-3/blob/main/README.md). The models sit inside a broader Sber ecosystem: they are deployed on the FusionBrain website and a Telegram bot[5](https://aclanthology.org/anthology-files/anthology-files/pdf/emnlp/2024.emnlp-demo.48.pdf), and later versions run inside GigaChat and the Kandinsky VK bot[6](https://www.sberbank.ru/en/press_center/all/article?blockID=1539&lang=en&newsID=403919b6-5c33-4da7-bbba-a35d533a4b34®ionID=77&type=NEWS). Those products, and Sber itself, have their own articles; here they matter as distribution channels.
## Release timeline and versions
The record documents the version history unevenly. Kandinsky 2.2, the largest predecessor to 3.0, totaled 4.6 billion parameters.[2](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.03511)
**Kandinsky 3.0** appeared in December 2023 as a single-stage latent diffusion text-to-image model[2](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.03511). Its full pipeline contains 11.9 billion parameters, almost three times more than the largest previous Kandinsky model[2](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.03511). The sources do not document Kandinsky 3.1 or 3.2 releases.
**Kandinsky 4.1 Image** moved the family to a diffusion transformer (DiT) architecture, according to Sber's press release[6](https://www.sberbank.ru/en/press_center/all/article?blockID=1539&lang=en&newsID=403919b6-5c33-4da7-bbba-a35d533a4b34®ionID=77&type=NEWS). Its exact release date is not stated in the record.
**Kandinsky 5.0** (2025) is a line of image and video models: Image Lite, a 6-billion-parameter model for HD image generation and editing; Video Lite, a 2-billion-parameter text-to-video and image-to-video model released in September 2025; and Video Pro, a 19-billion-parameter video model generating clips up to 10 seconds in HD[3](https://habr.com/ru/companies/sberbank/articles/971154/).
## Architecture and training as published
Kandinsky 3.0's disclosed design is a single-stage latent diffusion pipeline: an 8.6-billion-parameter text encoder taken from the Flan-UL2 20B model, a 3.0-billion-parameter denoising U-Net, and a 0.27-billion-parameter Sber-MoVQGAN image decoder[2](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.03511). The peer-reviewed EMNLP 2024 demo paper confirms these components and the 11.9B total[5](https://aclanthology.org/anthology-files/anthology-files/pdf/emnlp/2024.emnlp-demo.48.pdf). For comparison, the paper puts SDXL at 3.33 billion parameters[2](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.03511).
Training data, as vendor-disclosed, combined popular open-source datasets with an internal dataset of approximately 150 million text-image pairs, filtered by aesthetics, watermark detection, CLIP similarity, and perceptual-hash deduplication[2](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.03511). One gap drove a distinctive effort: the team found that data collected from [Common Crawl](https://www.edgepedia.org/common-crawl) contained almost no images related to Russian culture, so they collected and labeled a dataset of 200 thousand text-image pairs covering Soviet and Russian cartoons, famous people, and places[2](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.03511). Disclosed compute was substantial: 1.1 billion text-image pairs at 256×256 resolution on 104 NVIDIA A100s for 600 thousand steps, then 280 million pairs at mixed 768–1024 resolution on 416 A100s for 350 thousand steps[2](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.03511). The team reports running more than 500 experiments choosing between transformer-based and convolutional denoiser architectures, and found that FID values do not correlate well with visually noticeable improvements once generation quality is high[5](https://aclanthology.org/anthology-files/anthology-files/pdf/emnlp/2024.emnlp-demo.48.pdf).
Kandinsky 4.1 Image's training, per Sber's press release, processed over 10 million examples in pre-training, with supervised fine-tuning on more than 1.5 million diverse images selected by a team of over 100 specialists including photographers, artists, and designers, balanced across nine meta-categories[6](https://www.sberbank.ru/en/press_center/all/article?blockID=1539&lang=en&newsID=403919b6-5c33-4da7-bbba-a35d533a4b34®ionID=77&type=NEWS).
For Kandinsky 5.0, Sber reports pre-training Image Lite on more than 520 million images, with supervised fine-tuning on about 160 thousand images filtered to the top 1–3% by art-educated experts[3](https://habr.com/ru/companies/sberbank/articles/971154/). The 5.0 line's multilingual text understanding comes from Qwen2.5-VL trained on Russian-language data, which lets the models handle Russian prompts natively and render Cyrillic text directly on images[4](https://atmoscompute.com/glossary/image-gen/kandinsky).
## Benchmarks: vendor claims versus independent assessment
Nearly all quality claims in the record are vendor-run. For Kandinsky 3.0, Sber's technical report describes side-by-side human evaluations against Kandinsky 2.2, SDXL, and [DALL-E 3](https://www.edgepedia.org/dall-e-3) using 2.1K prompts in 21 categories, with 12 people voting an average of 30,000 times per comparison[2](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.03511). The EMNLP paper reports side-by-side comparisons on [DrawBench](https://www.edgepedia.org/drawbench) prompts against [Midjourney](https://www.edgepedia.org/midjourney) 5.2, SDXL, and DALL-E 3, and states that the model produces state-of-the-art results among open-source solutions according to human evaluation[5](https://aclanthology.org/anthology-files/anthology-files/pdf/emnlp/2024.emnlp-demo.48.pdf). These are the developers' own evaluations, not independent measurements.
For Kandinsky 5.0 Video Pro, Sber claims visual quality and dynamics at the level of Google's Veo 3 and significantly exceeding Wan 2.2 A14B[3](https://habr.com/ru/companies/sberbank/articles/971154/). This claim is not independently verified in the available record.
The one third-party assessment available reaches a narrower conclusion: for maximum quality of static images with English prompts, FLUX remains stronger than Kandinsky, while Kandinsky is positioned as best for Russian-language content, video, and unrestricted commercial use[4](https://atmoscompute.com/glossary/image-gen/kandinsky). No independent benchmark results, such as third-party human preference studies or a Russian text-to-image leaderboard, appear in the sources; the gap between Sber's parity claims and outside evaluation remains unresolved.
## Licensing, availability and comparison with other open models
Kandinsky 3's code and pretrained weights were released on [Hugging Face](https://www.edgepedia.org/hugging-face) under a permissive license[5](https://aclanthology.org/anthology-files/anthology-files/pdf/emnlp/2024.emnlp-demo.48.pdf). All Kandinsky 5.0 models are released under the [MIT License](https://www.edgepedia.org/mit-license), completely free for commercial use; this sets Kandinsky apart from FLUX.1 dev, which carries a non-commercial license, and [Stable Diffusion 3](https://www.edgepedia.org/stable-diffusion-3), which uses the Stability AI Community License with restrictions[4](https://atmoscompute.com/glossary/image-gen/kandinsky).
Distribution spans Hugging Face weights, the FusionBrain website and Telegram bot[5](https://aclanthology.org/anthology-files/anthology-files/pdf/emnlp/2024.emnlp-demo.48.pdf), and, for the 4.1 and 5.0 generations, GigaChat and the Kandinsky Telegram and VK bots[6](https://www.sberbank.ru/en/press_center/all/article?blockID=1539&lang=en&newsID=403919b6-5c33-4da7-bbba-a35d533a4b34®ionID=77&type=NEWS); Kandinsky 5.0 Image Lite and Video Pro are also available across GigaChat platforms including Telegram, the Max messenger, giga.chat, and Android[3](https://habr.com/ru/companies/sberbank/articles/971154/). Hardware requirements differ from Western peers: Kandinsky 5.0 needs a minimum of 12 GB VRAM, versus 8 GB for SDXL and 12 GB for FLUX.1 dev, and it offers video generation (Video Lite and Video Pro), which SDXL and FLUX.1 dev do not[4](https://atmoscompute.com/glossary/image-gen/kandinsky). Video Lite runs on home GPUs from 12 GB VRAM and ships with LoRA adaptation code[3](https://habr.com/ru/companies/sberbank/articles/971154/). The record contains no API or usage pricing.
## References
1. Kandinsky-3 GitHub README (ai-forever) — https://github.com/ai-forever/Kandinsky-3/blob/main/README.md
2. Kandinsky 3.0 technical report (arXiv) — https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.03511
3. Sber on Habr: Kandinsky 5.0 open-source image and video model line — https://habr.com/ru/companies/sberbank/articles/971154/
4. Kandinsky — AtmosCompute glossary — https://atmoscompute.com/glossary/image-gen/kandinsky
5. Kandinsky 3: Text-to-Image Synthesis for Multifunctional Generative Framework (EMNLP 2024 demo) — https://aclanthology.org/anthology-files/anthology-files/pdf/emnlp/2024.emnlp-demo.48.pdf
6. Sber press release: Kandinsky 4.1 Image — https://www.sberbank.ru/en/press_center/all/article?blockID=1539&lang=en&newsID=403919b6-5c33-4da7-bbba-a35d533a4b34®ionID=77&type=NEWS
7. Kandinsky Video 1.1, https://ai-forever.github.io/KandinskyVideo/K11/
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Technology and the built world › Computing and digital systems › Modern AI: foundation models, generative AI, and the AI industry › Model families and named models › Image generation models*
*Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Sep 18, 2026 · Edited: Sep 18, 2026; Oct 11, 2026 · Last review: Sep 18, 2026*
*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*
License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license