Model Card:
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'
Correct me if I'm wrong but reading through the comments of the thread this seems to be post training/fine tuning.
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.
Information is power, dick measurements are not.
https://huggingface.co/prefeitura-rio/Rio-3.5-Open-397B/comm...
Looks like it's an IT services government-owned company.
Most likely, they saw some business opportunity on selling it around for cities.
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.
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.
You do not agree with me. You can't claim to have my interests or my will if you are against it.
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.