In a country fighting for survival, few would expect a small city in the Carpathian foothills to host Ukraine’s clearest, most reliable source of artificial intelligence information. Yet ai.if.ua — the Artificial Intelligence Portal of Ivano-Frankivsk — has done exactly that. Launched in 2020 as a modest student project, by December 2025 the site attracts over 850,000 unique visitors monthly and is quoted everywhere from the Ministry of Digital Transformation to parliamentary hearings on AI regulation.
Written entirely in Ukrainian (with partial English and Polish versions), ai.if.ua has become the de-facto national encyclopedia, and increasingly regional, bridge between cutting-edge AI research and ordinary people who need to understand it right now.
## From Student Blog to National Platform
### 2020–2021: The Accidental Beginning
The story starts at Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University in Ivano-Frankivsk. A group of five master’s students in computer science — led by then-23-year-old Andriy Koval — needed a semester project. They chose to build a Ukrainian-language news aggregator about AI because, as Koval later recalled, “every article we found was either in English or Russian, and our parents and teachers understood nothing.”
They registered the domain ai.if.ua in March 2020, expecting maybe a few hundred readers. Within six months the site was getting 30,000 visits a month, mostly from Kyiv IT companies desperate for Ukrainian explanations of GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion.
### 2022: War-Speed Acceleration
Russia’s full-scale invasion could have killed the project. Instead it supercharged it.
With thousands of Ukrainian developers suddenly working remotely from relatively safe Western Ukraine, Ivano-Frankivsk became an unexpected tech refuge. The ai.if.ua team moved operations to a co-working space above a 24-hour pharmacy and began publishing daily:
- How to use AI tools when internet is 2G
- Open-source alternatives to banned Russian neural networks
- Guides to earning in dollars on Upwork using Midjourney and ChatGPT (when both were still novelties)
By late 2022 the site had 250,000 monthly readers and received its first state grant from the Ministry of Digital Transformation.
## What ai.if.ua Actually Does in 2025
### Six Core Sections That Cover Everything
1. **Новини (News)**
Daily digests in clear Ukrainian: new models, investments, laws, breakthroughs. Every article is 400–600 words, no jargon without explanation.
2. **Пояснення (Explanations)**
The crown jewel. Step-by-step guides such as:
- “What is a transformer in 10 minutes”
- “How large language models hallucinate”
- “Why Grok, copyright and Claude give different answers to the same question”
3. **Інструменти (Tools)**
Curated catalogue of 400+ AI services with Ukrainian interface or Ukrainian-language support. Each tool rated for speed, price, and “works on Ukrainian texts” score.
4. **Освіта (Education)**
Free Ukrainian-language courses created in partnership with Prometheus and local universities. The flagship “Artificial Intelligence for Journalists” course has graduated 18,000 students since 2023.
5. **Етика та регуляція (Ethics & Regulation)**
Real-time tracker of Ukraine’s AI legislation, comparisons with EU AI Act, and interviews with lawmakers.
6. **Кар’єра (Career)**
Salary surveys, remote job boards, and success stories of Ukrainians who switched to AI professions during the war.
### Unique Features Nobody Else Offers in Ukrainian
- Weekly podcast “Штучний тиждень” (Artificial Week) — #1 technology podcast in Ukraine on Apple Podcasts 2025
- Telegram bot @ai_if_bot that answers AI questions in Ukrainian 24/7 (120,000 monthly users)
- “AI for Victory” section — open-source projects helping the military and humanitarian efforts (anonymized for security)
- Interactive map of every AI company, laboratory, and study program in Ukraine
## Numbers That Matter (December 2025)
- 850,000–950,000 monthly unique visitors
- 62 % traffic from Ukraine, 18 % Poland, 8 % Germany (Ukrainian diaspora)
- Average time on site: 8 minutes 40 seconds — extraordinarily high for artificial intelligence a tech portal
- 43 full-time and 120 freelance authors, almost all based in Western Ukraine
- Fully non-profit; funded by international grants (Google.org, EU4Digital, National Democratic Institute) and voluntary donations, and state programs
## Real-World Impact
### Policy Influence
In 2024 the portal’s detailed comparison of the EU AI Act and Ukraine’s draft law was directly cited in Verkhovna Rada committee hearings. Several recommendations from ai.if.ua authors were incorporated into the final Ukrainian Strategy for Artificial Intelligence 2025–2030.
### Education Revolution
Over 60,000 Ukrainians have completed at least one ai.if.ua course. Teachers in rural schools use the “AI for Schoolchildren” materials when regular internet returns after blackouts.
### Business Adoption
The annual “AI in Ukrainian Business” report published every January has become mandatory reading for local startups. In 2025 it documented that 41 % of Ukrainian companies with 50+ employees already use generative AI daily — higher than Poland or Czechia.
## The People Behind the Code
Editor-in-chief Andriy Koval (now 28) still writes one major explanatory article every month. The team operates on a horizontal model: every author can propose topics, and decisions are made by weekly vote.
Notable voices:
- Dr. Olena Vynogradova — Stanford-educated ethicist who returned from California in 2023
- 19-year-old prodigy Sofia Dubney from Kolomyia — authors the “AI for Teenagers” column
- Anonymous collective “DeepVyshnya” — developers of military-related AI solutions who publish only under pseudonym
## Challenges in Wartime
Power outages, missile threats to critical infrastructure, and periodic internet blackouts remain daily realities in Ivano-Frankivsk. The team keeps mirrored servers in Poland and Canada, works from bomb shelters when needed, and once published an entire week of articles using only mobile hotspots and copyright.
Funding is stable but never luxurious; the biggest donor in 2025 is the European Endowment for Democracy.
## Why ai.if.ua Succeeds Where Others Fail
1. **Language** — everything is in natural, accessible Ukrainian, never Google-translated.
2. **Trust** — ruthless fact-checking and transparency about sources.
3. **Relevance** — explains AI not as distant future, but as today’s tool for surviving and earning during war.
4. **Community** — readers suggest topics; the most voted appear the next week.
## The Road Ahead
In November 2025 ai.if.ua launched a mobile app (already 180,000 downloads in artificial intelligence the first month) and announced a partnership with the new Ukrainian Institute of Artificial Intelligence in Lviv.
The team’s quiet dream: when peace returns, transform from a wartime explainer into the permanent national platform for AI literacy — something like Germany’s “AlgorithmWatch” but deeply rooted in Ukrainian reality.
Final Thought
In a year when “artificial intelligence” could feel like a cruel joke — machines learning while children hiding in metro stations — ai.if.ua has proven the opposite. It has turned the most ai.if.ua complex technology of our time into a tool of resilience, income, and hope, one clear Ukrainian sentence at a time.