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Rio de Janeiro's "homegrown" LLM appears to be a merge of an existing model

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Re: Rio de Janeiro's "homegrown" LLM appears to be a merge of an existing model

#161
post #92

I'm honestly surprised that they even had the inclination to attempt creating a model. I guess it's bullish that a municipal IT department had the guts to try this?

I like the [dead] comment theory that they proposed a huge LLM training budget to the government, kept most of the money, and released a cheap merge to justify the grift.

Ah that makes sense

Re: Rio de Janeiro's "homegrown" LLM appears to be a merge of an existing model

#162
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lying about model capability is right now the lingua franca of the cloud AI business model, almost; they yes-and each other's lies because they are in a position of needing to generate interest, including going as far as needing to trigger regulatory capture. (It's not news to anyone who has worked in sales-led businesses that salespeople are prone to believing the claims of other salespeople, I guess).

> Lying about model capability is right now the lingua franca of the cloud AI business model Lying about your lab's capabilities != Lying about model capability Exaggerating the capabilities of a new model that you've actually trained in press bulletins can be called marketing. Merging two models and claiming that you trained a new model is plain lazy.

[deleted]

Re: Rio de Janeiro's "homegrown" LLM appears to be a merge of an existing model

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm honestly impressed that this even happened at all. "Rio de Janeiro's homegrown LLM" is probably the last headline I ever expected to read on HN.

Worth reminding everyone that Lua was also created in Rio, though admittedly at PUC rather than by the government. Rio has a strong engineering talent pool, along with many other major capitals in Brazil

[deleted]

Re: Rio de Janeiro's "homegrown" LLM appears to be a merge of an existing model

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm honestly impressed that this even happened at all. "Rio de Janeiro's homegrown LLM" is probably the last headline I ever expected to read on HN.

Worth reminding everyone that Lua was also created in Rio, though admittedly at PUC rather than by the government. Rio has a strong engineering talent pool, along with many other major capitals in Brazil

Brazil does have talent. Mauro Carvalho Chehab is a Linux kernel maintainer. Elixir was created by José Valim, a brazilian. I have also created my own programming language.

What Brazil doesn't have is a history of properly rewarding talent, which often causes it to migrate elsewhere. So it's definitely surprising when any sort of technological development happens in Brazil: it implies someone who stayed managed to get something done, most likely for much less than what that something is actually worth, while also being crushed by extremely high taxes that essentially doubles the cost of computer hardware.

Re: Rio de Janeiro's "homegrown" LLM appears to be a merge of an existing model

#166

This is fascinating that it worked though. Can we just merge all the open weight models and get something better?

Merging related models has been a very common practice for years. See the Stable Diffusion community.

Re: Rio de Janeiro's "homegrown" LLM appears to be a merge of an existing model

#167

It's absolutely insane to me that we are now at a point where the top of the front page of hacker news is a random GitHub issue about attribution to some random LLM merge, written in just the most disgusting AI slop style. I would like to downvote this please.

There's been a noticeable drop in quality. It's often a blend of AI culture war posts and arbitrary Github links.

Re: Rio de Janeiro's "homegrown" LLM appears to be a merge of an existing model

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think your last point is correct. Ablation, when done correctly, seems to increase the quality and typically also the performance too.

Abliterarion is a brute force technique that removes or silences parts of the model. It reduces performance because the abliterated elements aren’t perfectly isolated to censorship so other aspects suffer. Many of the “uncensored” model providers also do some fine tuning on the models. Some of them target better benchmarks or other measures, but outside of the benchmarks and metrics they’re fine tuned for they are ge…

The kind of abliteration you are mentioning is no longer state of the art or the most common form of removing the refusal layer in most models. Your your understanding was up to date about a year and a half ago, but has been out of date since after that.

Re: Rio de Janeiro's "homegrown" LLM appears to be a merge of an existing model

#169

I have no affiliation with them but here's what I think happened: 1. They claim the official model is based on Qwen 397B. It's likely they didn't disclose Nex Pro at all because Nex itself is based on the same base model (not saying they shouldn't). 2. The improvement would come from merging the weights PLUS on-policy distillation. The confusion is that the uploaded model didn't have the distillation at all. 3. It's…

What do you mean World Cup debut? haven't they won 5?
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