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  • Hacker News
  • 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?
    by fkozlowski
  • Can someone please explain or link to some information about how models are merged? Is this genuinely merging weights mathematically or some kind of distillation (presumably not if they’ve done zero training as the post suggests).
    by jordz
  • “Well, Steve (Jobs), I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox, and I broke into his house to steal the TV set, but I found out that you had already stolen it.”

    -- Bill Gates

    by jrm4
  • The model's webpage at https://huggingface.co/prefeitura-rio/Rio-3.5-Open-397B says it's a merge now. It previously didn't contain this paragraph:

    >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.

    Incidentally are people using Github issues as blogs now?

    by AlienRobot
  • Oh no, someone is profiting off of their work without proper attribution!?!?
    by zinodaur
  • 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.
    by unrvl22
  • > 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.

    by hintymad
  • 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 important to notice they didn't advertise the model besides posting it on Reddit 2 days ago. It became viral organically, over the weekend, and during Brazil's World Cup debut (Brazilians will understand). Of course the mayor of Rio took the opportunity to capitalize over the free coverage, but that wasn't done in conjunction with the researchers.

    4. I don't see why they would disclose Qwen 397B as base and mention the SwiReasoning paper but not mention Nex if all they did was to merge both models.

    5. In any case, what they are claiming is easily verifiable once (if) they upload the right model.

    by rafaquintanilha

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