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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

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ge…

Brazil has the opposite of high taxes, especially for company owners. I remember paying 6% on income, compared to up to 70% in Sweden.

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

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> extremely high taxes I always find this funny. Brazilian taxes are nowhere near what I would say “high”. I pay about twice as much out of my compensation as I would pay in Brazil, and that would be as if I did zero tax optimisation back then.

As an employee: your taxes are not that high, but public services are terrible so most of middle-class ends up paying for the private alternative as well. As a business owner: not so bad if you are a freelancing or just a few business partners providing some type of service, but terrible the moment you start considering employing other people.

> but public services are terrible

Have you seen the public services of countries with lower taxes? Their public hospitals?

> but terrible the moment you start considering employing other people.

Employing people isn't cheap anywhere (except, perhaps, in the US, where labour rights are kind of nonexistent)

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

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an employee: your taxes are not that high, but public services are terrible so most of middle-class ends up paying for the private alternative as well. As a business owner: not so bad if you are a freelancing or just a few business partners providing some type of service, but terrible the moment you start considering employing other people.

> but public services are terrible Have you seen the public services of countries with lower taxes? Their public hospitals? > but terrible the moment you start considering employing other people. Employing people isn't cheap anywhere (except, perhaps, in the US, where labour rights are kind of nonexistent)

I live in Germany. No such thing as public hospitals. And I pay close to 1200€/month in health insurance to the public insurance company.

I quick visit to the dermatologist to check for some tiny bumps that showed up in my forehead: 60€, out of pocket, because the insurer doesn't cover it.

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

#215

Its stupid and hilarious when someone in Rio does it; when a techbro in silicon valley does it they get VC funding, a maserati and an entry on the 30 under 30 list.

I don't think people are saying it's stupid. It's just funny that potentially some random municipality worker is going well beyond their work scope and making contributions in the AI world.

Could be from Rio, could be from any municipality anywhere in the world. The fact that the account is actually from the town hall rahter than a personal account also makes it funnier.

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

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But this seems like quite an oversight... Not to me, what would people like to happen? Who are those people? And why do they care?

They made a public claim to having produced a useful model, which they published. Turns out they did nothing of the sort. > why do they care? Why does anyone ever care about having their time wasted by fraudulent claims?

Continue to explain like I’m 5 instead of the rhetoricals

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

#217
Please do not claim you trained a new model, only to got caught red-handed by others. There are already several people or groups did that, got caught, and vanished in no time.

Check how the "authors" of "this model" react to this problem [1]. See how they deal with this problem by first changing their affiliation from https://iplanrio.rio.rj.gov.br to https://iplanrio.prefeitura.rio [2], then saying that they are sorry for being caught [3], then just remove all their affiliations once for all [4].

I think the "authors" of "this model" [5] should be held accountable until they upload new checkpoints, and the performance of the new model is verified by third-parties.

P.S. To people who downvoted me, show me why you're doing this.

[1] https://huggingface.co/prefeitura-rio/Rio-3.5-Open-397B/comm...

[2] https://huggingface.co/prefeitura-rio/Rio-3.5-Open-397B/comm...

[3] https://huggingface.co/prefeitura-rio/Rio-3.5-Open-397B/comm...

[4] https://huggingface.co/prefeitura-rio/Rio-3.5-Open-397B/comm...

[5] https://huggingface.co/prefeitura-rio

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

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't. The entirety of the comment I responded to is "Oh no, someone is profiting off of their work without proper attribution!?!?" It's a valid point, but references someone using content created by others for profit. I'm objecting to equating this project with the work done by the original content creators. They're not remotely the same thing. I understand how the internet works and how people respond to others…

> It isn’t It is. > I understand how the internet works and how people respond to others in this type of setting, but the comment I replied to did not in any way make the point I was making about the disproportionate nature of relative contributions. Do you understand? Jokes aren’t that funny when you have to dig into an explanation on the nuance of why the hidden meaning doesn’t match the surface meaning in exact de…

Have a nice day.

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

#220
post #2

The municipality of Rio de Janeiro (via its IT company IplanRIO) released Rio-3.5-Open-397B, presented as a homegrown Qwen3.5 fine-tune that beats comparable open models on benchmarks. The linked issue argues it's actually a weighted merge of ~60% Nex-N2 Pro + ~40% Qwen3.5-397B-A17B - Nex-N2 having been released about a week earlier.

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

A few years back these used to be called "Frankenstein models"
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