Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

131–140 of 261 posts

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

#131
post #96

> Every weight tensor in Rio is, to thousands of standard deviations, the same 0.6/0.4 blend of Nex and Qwen — across all 60 layers and every component of the network. Other finetunes cannot be explained as interpolations. I find it amazing how robust the current deep learning models are. A simple linear combination of every weight did not degrade the performance of the model, but enhanced it.

This works because Nex itself is a finetune of Qwen3.5 ( https://huggingface.co/nex-agi/Nex-N2-Pro ). It's merging Qwen3.5 with a Qwen3.5 finetune. I don't believe this would work on two LLMs that have different pretraining. Even if it did you would need two LLMs that have exact same internal activation shapes, dimensions, expert counts, token vocabulary, realistically it would never happen outside of finetunes or ac…

not this exact thing, no, because the functional circuits dont appear in the same places across models. but if you find where they are you can do something like branch between some of the middle functional circuits between models and it kinda just works, or even do one after the other. you cant just like swap any two layers cause a bunch of em bend hyperbolic curvature to do hierarchical stuff deep in the poincare ball and the geometries get all bonkers, but before and after they do that things are relatively flat, and the geometries are more or less transferrable up to rigid rotation if they're each trained on large enough data.

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

#133

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…

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.

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

#134
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.

That's essentially Brazil's standard operating procedure. Wouldn't be surprising if that turned out to be the case.

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

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

#135
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just described every single vibe coder...

I think that's unfair to "vibe coding". If anybody explicitly claims to vibe coding something than they are admitting to low supervision of the code. And on the contrary you can also AI-produce code that you have supervised highly. I suppose there are people who both AI their code and push it as bespoke but I, for one, have not met such a person at our outside of work.

>> but I, for one, have not met such a person at our outside of work.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48516679

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

#136
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.

It's kinda weird to claim extraordinary results in such case though, as that brings a lot of eyes to it.

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

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a recurrent Brazilian meme: Rio is known in Brazil as "terra de bandido" (gangster's land). The majority of their politicians have ties to organized crime. There is a virtual revolving door between police and crime, where people migrate from one to the other. It is like Chicago in the 20s, Naples and Medelin in the 80s or Moscow and Culiacan (Sinaloa, Mexico) today.

Somehow I doubt that political affiliations with crime syndicates are affecting heavily the dispositions of LLM developers. The industry itself though is one of incest.

He is putting into question the character of the public workers involved in the project, not that it has anything to do with organized crime. Rio has relapsed into crime in the last decades and government workers in general have a reputation for corruption in Brazil. It's a low trust society specially north of Parana hence the lack of surprise.

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

#138
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know model merging like that was possible. (Obviously possible from a pure software standpoint but I'm surprised it's effective)

As another poster above linked, it’s been shown to be effective since 2022: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.05482

it works because Nex N2 is also a derivative of the original base Qwen model. If it was two completely unrelated models it wouldn't work.

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

#139

> Every weight tensor in Rio is, to thousands of standard deviations, the same 0.6/0.4 blend of Nex and Qwen — across all 60 layers and every component of the network. Other finetunes cannot be explained as interpolations. I find it amazing how robust the current deep learning models are. A simple linear combination of every weight did not degrade the performance of the model, but enhanced it.

> A simple linear combination of every weight did not degrade the performance of the model, but enhanced it. Enhanced it on a couple benchmarks, supposedly. The game is to turn knobs until you get a benchmark run that shows an improvement, then ship it. There are a lot of fine tunes and chimera models on HuggingFace that are supposedly better at some specific test, but when you use them for anything else they're usua…

> game is to turn knobs until you get a benchmark run that shows an improvement, then ship it

i.e reinforcement learning against a weak reward function - benchmark is insufficiently complex and is not representative of the real world sufficiently.

The "game", i.e. decision tree can be modeled as a multi-arm bandit problem, to deploy finite resources ( compute) toward exploitation/exploration .

The main issue is each training / fine-tune is very expensive so number of chances at the slot so to speak is pretty limited today.

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

#140

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…

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.

Yes! That "prefeitura do Rio" huggingface URL is definitely shocking to read to this Brazilian as well (I'm assuming you and parent also are from your usernames).
Post reply on HN