Story
Rio de Janeiro's "homegrown" LLM appears to be a merge of an existing model
1 report
1 website
1 discussion
Latest report
Overview
Rio-3.5-Open-397B is a 397B model that combines weights from Nex-N2_pro and Qwen3.5-397B-A17B in a ratio of 0.6 to 0.4. There is no evidence of independent training for this model, indicating it is a direct merge of existing models.
Summary from github.com.
Reports
One report so far. Additional coverage will appear here when it is linked to this story.
Community reactions
Each reaction summarizes sampled comments from the linked discussion.
Hacker News · github.com
Hacker News discussion ↗
Historical count: 5 · 5 saved in sample · Historical sample
Analysis ready
Read this discussion’s reaction
Based on 5 sampled comments from this thread. Analyzed 2026-06-14.
- Praise: The concept of merging open weight models to create a potentially superior AI is intriguing, suggesting a collaborative approach to model development that could enhance performance.
- Praise: The involvement of Rio de Janeiro's IT department in AI work, even with limited resources, indicates a growing interest in leveraging AI technologies for public benefit.
- Concern: Claims of improved outputs from post-training were misleading, raising serious ethical concerns about transparency and accountability in AI model development.
- Concern: The model's actual performance is questionable, as it appears to be a weighted merge rather than a genuine fine-tune, which could mislead users about its capabilities.
- Concern: Concerns about the misuse of taxpayer money for potentially fraudulent AI claims highlight the need for stricter oversight in public sector AI initiatives.