Rio de Janeiro's city government model Rio3.5 beats Qwen3.7 in recent benchmarks

Posted by lucasfcosta 3 days ago

Comments

Comment by VoidWhisperer 3 days ago

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'

Comment by w4yai 3 days ago

> 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...

Comment by daquisu 3 days ago

It was a recent edit though. Yesterday snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20260613072958/https://huggingfa...

Comment by giancarlostoro 2 days ago

How does that contradict that they uploaded the wrong model?

Comment by danieldrehmer 2 days ago

can you offer a 4-bit quantized version and name it Zé Pequeno, pretty please?

Comment by scotty79 2 days ago

I'd love to see people figuring out how to build models from several smaller ones. We could then train small specialized models and deploy setups more optimized for any given task. Modular LLMs should be a thing.

Comment by giancarlostoro 2 days ago

This is something I've been trying to figure out for a bit, some models are really good at instructions, but their context window is too small, I do wonder if having a cluster of smaller models would be feasible. Been building a custom coding harness so once its nice and polished I might experiment with this more.

Comment by urbnspacecowboy 2 days ago

See discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48528371

Comment by pixel_popping 1 day ago

To be fair, I still find it to be a great initiative.

Comment by mettamage 3 days ago

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.

Comment by oceansky 3 days ago

Yes. It's post training in qwen using the novel SwiReasoning framework.

Comment by hedgehog 3 days ago

I hadn't seen SwiReasoning (https://swireasoning.github.io, paper and code), it looks like that works at generation time without any requirements on the model. It increases token-efficiency and accuracy, but at first skim it seems like this would be incompatible with multi-token prediction. For large reductions in token budget it could be worth it.

Comment by rafaquintanilha 3 days ago

Doesn't look like it's incompatible. Someone already released a quantization using MTP: https://huggingface.co/foxipanda/Rio-3.5-Open-397B-GGUF

Comment by hedgehog 3 days ago

As I understand it the basic premise of all the speculative decoding schemes is that the logits on the draft don't need to be exact so long as you mostly sample the same tokens, and because each position is fed by the embedding associated with the previous position's token you sort of "round away" error. With SwiReasoning I think you skip the sampling/rounding part and do something continuous using the whole distribution, so it would seem to rely on the accuracy of those values. MTP still makes sense outside the latent reasoning chunks though.

Comment by Kelteseth 3 days ago

Thanks, Firefox and uBlock does not let me watch any X content (I guess this is a good thing)

Comment by drnick1 3 days ago

Same thing here, X content and trackers are blocked by my Firefox settings. The occasional inconvenience is a small price to pay not to be profiled by X, Google, FB, Amazon, and countless other Internet parasites.

Comment by adrian_b 3 days ago

> Post-trained from Qwen 3.5 397B

Model Card:

https://huggingface.co/prefeitura-rio/Rio-3.5-Open-397B

Comment by arjie 3 days ago

Benchmaxxing is the new “have a crypto trading strategy”. No one is impressed by it except non practitioners.

Comment by kruxigt 3 days ago

[dead]

Comment by Aurornis 3 days ago

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.

Comment by marcosdumay 3 days ago

> 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.

Comment by embedding-shape 3 days ago

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.

Comment by HeliumHydride 3 days ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1u4fzg1/new_mod... https://x.com/SemiAnalysis_/status/2065894494935933191

Comment by 3 days ago

Comment by dizhn 2 days ago

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.

Comment by betimsl 2 days ago

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 :)

Comment by pelasaco 2 days ago

The Taubaté LLM Hoax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taubat%C3%A9_pregnancy_hoax

Comment by mrandish 3 days ago

> 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?

Comment by true_religion 3 days ago

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.

Comment by senorrib 2 days ago

It's the municipal IT company, and the dude that did this is a volunteer.

Comment by xbar 3 days ago

Sexy.

Comment by 3 days ago

Comment by cuzezzzbbfofai 3 days ago

[flagged]

Comment by atoav 3 days ago

A government ideally is a representation of the democratically chosen will of the people. If it is not, work towards making it so. IMO wherever someone says "the government" we should mentally substitute "we all, collectively".

But a specific type of person appears to labour under the illusion that somehow we can get by without we all collectively steering our direction and choosing people who do what needs to be done without commercial interest. Their idea is that instead of choosing people who do it, we just make them compete for who can squeeze the most profit out of dealing with a problem and "somehow" that leads to a better result. When you press them for the details on that part of the mechanism, you will usually get crickets.

Comment by cassianoleal 3 days ago

Thank you, that's also one of my peeves.

Interestingly, the people who try to separate themselves from "the government" also seem to be the kind of people who want to "spread our model of democracy to the rest of the world".

How they can even reconcile being such a great democracy that the world needs to ~copy~ be force-fed with having an adversary government I don't know. The cognitive dissonance is so great that it's hard to fathom.

Comment by hgoel 3 days ago

It's all such a self-defeating ideology, they think the government isn't doing a good enough job, so they lobby to make it impossible for them to do a good job and then pretend that it proves their point.

Comment by latency-guy2 3 days ago

"we all" is wrong, always.

You do not agree with me. You can't claim to have my interests or my will if you are against it.

Comment by atoav 2 days ago

Yes? With sufficient pedantic spirit anything can be argued against. This is what you're doing. So to give a counter-example: You drive with three friends in a car. You ask them: "Do we all want to go to MC Donald's?"

Explain how it is wrong and why it would be. If it is always wrong it follows it has to be wrong here too. The answer is that the meaning of "we all" is context dependent and that friend of yours that argues that we all somehow includes people in the whole city is an oddball that doesn't pick up the context within the words have been said.

We can all go around and make each others day worse with deliberate pedantry by ignoring the context of words, but that is basically just a waste of human energy. If you disagree with the fundamental point I made, argue against it based on the merits of the idea instead of arguing semantics.

Comment by naasking 3 days ago

> IMO wherever someone says "the government" we should mentally substitute "we all, collectively".

No, we should substitute "unaccountable bureaucrats". The people who enter and leave power from elections are not the source of the daily frustrations people have with government, it's the rest.

Comment by atoav 3 days ago

If this is in fact an issue where you life, then you should consider stopping to elect politicians that allow bureaucrats to be unaccountable. Or stop believing politicians who rave on about how bureaucrats are unaccountable while they themselves have the power to shape systems where that would not be the case.

Comment by naasking 2 days ago

I don't have to believe politicians, I see it with my own eyes whenever I deal with government employees.

Comment by airstrike 3 days ago

how do you think that alleged amorphous mass of unaccountable bureaucrats got their jobs?

Comment by naasking 2 days ago

Same way anyone else got their job, but that's beside the point. The point is that accountability in government is significantly lower than in private industry, and this is a big source of the problems.

Comment by blahblaher 3 days ago

yes, let's instead trust a bunch of billionaires, that "for sure" have your and all of our interests at heart. And no, the "invisible hand" does not exist, it's the Epstein class hand, you just don't see it

Comment by hmokiguess 3 days ago

Never let them know your next move

Comment by ramon156 3 days ago

Every day I'm reminded why I don't spend time on twitter. What use does it have to claim "X is better than Y in benchmark Z, disagreeing with that means disagreeing with me"