Lying about model capability is right now the lingua franca of the cloud AI business model, almost; they yes-and each other's lies because they are in a position of needing to generate interest, including going as far as needing to trigger regulatory capture.
(It's not news to anyone who has worked in sales-led businesses that salespeople are prone to believing the claims of other salespeople, I guess).
The model card also says that they use an inference framework based on "SwiReasoning: Switch-Thinking in Latent and Explicit for Pareto-Superior Reasoning LLMs" by Shi et al.:
"Their work"? First you had the original content creators that did 99.99% of the work. Then you had the US companies bundle it up into a frontier LLM. Then "they" did the "work" of using the US model as a foundation for their own. So in the sense of doing 0.00001% of the actual work that went into their product, sure.
I'd say it's more like someone forking a Linux distro, adding a few themes and fonts, and then complaining when someone else forks their distro and adds another theme.
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.
“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.”
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?
One funny thing about incompetence is that they don't have the competence to know that their incompetence is straightforward to verify by a competent person.
I wouldn’t describe what happened here as incompetence. As a “carioca”, I am pleasantly surprised to know that the government’s IT department is involved in AI work — even without the budget to create its own models from scratch.
>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?
most merge improve a small subset of "feeling" benchmark (too small, too specific, or out of distribution) and tend to show degradation on actual benchmark, with especially punishing result on long chain benchmarks.
also only work on matching architectures (i.e. finetunes/loras of the same model)
that kinda worked in llama 1/2 era, not between different models but between finetunes of the same model. the briefly legendary Mythomax was IIRC a merge of 5+ tunes, some of which were merges themselves.
No, they need the same arch, but you can distill them into a single model. And yes, if you use the API directly Claude will often say it’s an open weight model (likely the ones it was distilled from)
The allegation here is that it's not actually a fine-tune of Qwen, but instead an undisclosed mashup (merge) of someone else's fine-tune of Qwen and the original model. Rio subsequently said that the model was in fact a merge, that they did additional fine-tuning after the merge, and that they accidentally uploaded the base merge instead of the version with additional fine-tuning. But this seems like quite an oversight...
Without evidence, your comment is just bad mouthing.
I have been involved in academia, including in Brazil, and I don't find academia there any more copycat than any other institution, including top tier ones.
(It's not news to anyone who has worked in sales-led businesses that salespeople are prone to believing the claims of other salespeople, I guess).
The model card says:
> Post-trained from Qwen 3.5 397B
The model card also says that they use an inference framework based on "SwiReasoning: Switch-Thinking in Latent and Explicit for Pareto-Superior Reasoning LLMs" by Shi et al.:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05069
So the sources seem properly attributed.
They only claim that what they did to "Qwen 3.5 397B" has improved the LLM, including, as expected, with "strong performance in Portuguese".
I'd say it's more like someone forking a Linux distro, adding a few themes and fonts, and then complaining when someone else forks their distro and adds another theme.
-- Bill Gates
>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?
also only work on matching architectures (i.e. finetunes/loras of the same model)
Its a fine tune of Qwen
Not a conspiracy
I have been involved in academia, including in Brazil, and I don't find academia there any more copycat than any other institution, including top tier ones.
What does it have to do with Brazilian academia?