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- Hacker News
- > Rio de Janeiro's city government model...
Because... lack of a good open weight LLM is a pressing need high on the municipal priorities list for Rio de Janeiro citizens?
by mrandish - It's the municipal IT company, and the dude that did this is a volunteer.by senorrib
- Should governments not take actions that later benefit the academic, scientific, and economic welfare of their constituents?
Or is it that it’s a city doing this?
Now Brazil does know how to boondoggle its finances for a prestigious cause with little return (e.g. the Olympics games) but this is far smaller a cost, more akin to a city setting up a tech accelerator or making a media campaign about how important STEM is.
- The Taubaté LLM Hoax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taubat%C3%A9_pregnancy_hoaxby pelasaco
- Mr Erdoğan launched and initiative yesterday to become the leader in the AI space. As absurd of a claim as his 2023 (hard) landing on the moon.by dizhn
- The problem with these is the tool calling. From my experiments qwen agent almost always fails with tool calling and porting the correct config is quite tedious.
Rio3.5 with Qwen compatible tool calling, we need that :)
by betimsl - A city government funding a fine-tune of a model is interesting.
As for the benchmarks: If you spend any time playing with fine tunes of published models you know that benchmarks are gamed so much that they're a useless indicator of performance for models from small teams. It's too easy to fine tune a model to perform well on the benchmarks, release it, put a line on your resume saying you released a model that beat the major labs on benchmarks, and then try to use that to jump into a new job. The temptation is high.
There are a lot of fringe models and fine tunes that claim to have better performance on some benchmark. Then you try to use them and find they're often worse at general tasks than the base model.
I would wait and see if these results hold across other benchmarks. It's cool that the city is doing something with AI, but this is something where extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I doubt a small, previously unknown team has unlocked something secret that the team who made Qwen couldn't figure out. It's more likely it was fine tuned for a specific outcome (possibly these benchmarks) and performance in other areas was reduced as a consequence.
by Aurornis - Indeed, this is all very true, I'd say it's true for the larger teams too, the entire ecosystem is so gamed by now that if you don't have your own private benchmarks with private test cases you haven't shared publicly, it's almost impossible to get a fair picture how well a model works, unless you actually sit down and use it.
- > A city government funding a fine-tune of a model is interesting.
Looks like it's an IT services government-owned company.
Most likely, they saw some business opportunity on selling it around for cities.
by marcosdumay - Benchmaxxing is the new “have a crypto trading strategy”. No one is impressed by it except non practitioners.by arjie
- > Post-trained from Qwen 3.5 397B
Model Card:
by adrian_b - https://xcancel.com/ZenMagnets/status/2065796012820848699
Correct me if I'm wrong but reading through the comments of the thread this seems to be post training/fine tuning.
by mettamage - Thanks, Firefox and uBlock does not let me watch any X content (I guess this is a good thing)by Kelteseth
- Yes. It's post training in qwen using the novel SwiReasoning framework.by oceansky
- https://github.com/nex-agi/Nex-N2/issues/4
Seems that they didn't make/train a new novel model, they did a mix of two existing models and then gave it an instruction to say it was 'Rio, trained by Rio AI Labs'
- To be fair, I still find it to be a great initiative.
- See discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48528371
- > The model is built via a merge of https://huggingface.co/nex-agi/Nex-N2-Pro and https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, proceeded by On-Policy Distillation from a stronger model. We detected an incorrect upload in the previous version, where the base merged version was upload instead of the final distilled model. We are sorry for the confusion and apologize profusely.
https://huggingface.co/prefeitura-rio/Rio-3.5-Open-397B/comm...
by w4yai