[rafaquintanilha]

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.

[throwa356262]

Regarding #2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48529544

[xiphias2]

This should be at the top: they uploaded the wrong model, they fixed it

[jwitthuhn]

They did upload the wrong model but as of the time of writing they have not fixed it. Right now, 12 hours after they took the old one down, there is simply no model present in their huggingface repo.

[xiphias2]

I guess they will upload it later, it seems like an honest mistake to me.

Anyways SwiTransformer paper looks interesting and doing a post training to optimize for it looks interesting as well.

[00index]

Looks like they couldn't find the correct weights. https://x.com/IplanRio_rj/status/2066693494769348946

[matheusmoreira]

I'm honestly impressed that this even happened at all. "Rio de Janeiro's homegrown LLM" is probably the last headline I ever expected to read on HN.

[airstrike]

Worth reminding everyone that Lua was also created in Rio, though admittedly at PUC rather than by the government.

Rio has a strong engineering talent pool, along with many other major capitals in Brazil

[matheusmoreira]

Brazil does have talent. Mauro Carvalho Chehab is a Linux kernel maintainer. Elixir was created by José Valim, a brazilian. I have also created my own programming language.

What Brazil doesn't have is a history of properly rewarding talent, which often causes it to migrate elsewhere. So it's definitely surprising when any sort of technological development happens in Brazil: it implies someone who stayed managed to get something done, most likely for much less than what that something is actually worth, while also being crushed by extremely high taxes that essentially doubles the cost of computer hardware.

[red-iron-pine]

> extremely high taxes that essentially doubles the cost of computer hardware.

I think people are missing the last few words -- cost of computing hardware

when I used to do ISP work I did a lot for LATAM. The joke was that you'd get better bandwidth for Brazil routing out of the country and through Miami than going across the country. The reason? crazy high tariffs on hardware.

No reason to base anything locally, and if you're not basing it locally then there isn't really much reason to stick around, either. Go to other hot markets like Zona America, Austin, CDMX, Miami, Los Angeles, etc. and make the big $$$.

I worked with 2 Brazilian engineers who were in country (and currently work with a 3rd now, based in Monteal) and they were very good but all said they had to get out of country to lock in the serious engineering roles.

[rbanffy]

> extremely high taxes

I always find this funny. Brazilian taxes are nowhere near what I would say “high”. I pay about twice as much out of my compensation as I would pay in Brazil, and that would be as if I did zero tax optimisation back then.

[fabioz]

I can second this.

Compared to many countries Brazil doesn't have such high taxes (I'd say that if you work remotely for a company outside of Brazil, you'll probably have much lower taxes compared to almost any other country -- working locally the difference isn't as big, but you have higher taxes in many other places).

What it really lacks is access to capital (which is the real "mojo" of the US compared to the rest of the world).

[iterateoften]

Also the bureaucracy, employee rights, etc.

Incorporating and getting a functional business entity in Brazil is harder. In USA I literally do in 5min online including bank account. In Brazil they are taking out microscopes to verify your signature on the paperwork matches.

And in the USA if you have one bad employee, just fire them any time. In Brazil for better or for worse nowhere near as easy. Obviously better for employees but businesses don’t like it because you can get stuck with a employee dragging down everyone unless you pay them a years salary etc.

[rglullis]

As an employee: your taxes are not that high, but public services are terrible so most of middle-class ends up paying for the private alternative as well.

As a business owner: not so bad if you are a freelancing or just a few business partners providing some type of service, but terrible the moment you start considering employing other people.

[rbanffy]

> but public services are terrible

Have you seen the public services of countries with lower taxes? Their public hospitals?

> but terrible the moment you start considering employing other people.

Employing people isn't cheap anywhere (except, perhaps, in the US, where labour rights are kind of nonexistent)

[persedes]

Parent was referring to the cost of hardware. I've had colleagues from brazil visit the US and go absolutely crazy at best buy to grab as much hardware as they could (laptops, nintendo switch, etc), because it's prohibitively expensive for them to buy that at home.

[dlisboa]

It's not "prohibitively" expensive if they managed to pay for flights to the US, hotels and then buy several pieces of hardware. They definitely had more than enough money to buy whatever they wanted in Brazil. It is, however, much more expensive than it should be, which leaves a bad taste in our mouths and means people will find other ways of acquiring some items.

[matheusmoreira]

Yeah. Brazilians go nuts when they see US prices. Every family member who travels to the US is showered with purchase requests. Anything they manage to bring back without being taxed essentially receives a 50% discount.

[matheusmoreira]

Import taxes in Brazil are 60%, plus something like 18% on top of the product, shipping and the aforementioned import taxes.

The result is a nearly 100% tax on computers and consumer electronics.

One for you, one for the government.

And it's getting worse. Tariffs on computer hardware were raised only a few months ago.

[drdexebtjl]

60% (II) with 18% (ICMS) on top for a total of +88% are the import tariffs for individuals buying devices for personal use, and small businesses using simplified postal/courier regimes.

The tariffs for commercial importations are much lower and depend on the part. For SSDs, for example, II is around 10%. With other fees and ICMS, you're looking at around +60% total. Still high, but not nearly as high.

But large businesses would rather really prefer if you continued to believe they pay +88% just like you. That way they get to point at the government while keeping their fat margins.

[rbanffy]

Doesn't Dell, HP, and a number of others have manufacturing in Brazil under better tax regimes for the parts? I remember one of the points of the Zona Franca de Manaus was that - build a factory and enjoy tax breaks mostly for your imports.

Apart from that, this is something that affects the HN crowd and almost nobody else.

[troauei]

> I pay about twice as much out of my compensation as I would pay in Brazil

Brazil relies heavily on indirect taxation, not income tax.

The average Brazilian effectively pays about *41.1%* of their gross income in taxes when all major taxes are included. (https://ibpt.org.br/brasileiro-trabalha-150-dias-por-ano-ape...)

They break it down as: roughly 15.2% from income-related taxes, 3.1% from property taxes, and *22.9% from consumption taxes*.

---

And anyway, the real problem is that the burden of tax is way way higher for a brazilian than someone in the global north.

As a general rule, in Brazil only people who do qualified work can reach the (converted) 1000 USD threshold. People who spent years in university or trade school, and are either very good at their jobs or graduated in prestigious professions such as engineering, law or medicine.

Even if they were to pay no taxes, most 40-hour week professional programmers here would still earn, at the end of the day, less than a high-school diploma 20-hour worker in US. Let that sink in.

Now take into account that on average, out of those $1000, $400 becomes taxes: In practice, there are lots of qualified workers here who don't even make $8k/year after taxes...

And no, the lower living cost does NOT offset it. Imported/technology goods are disproportionately expensive relative to income since we receive in BRL but still pay the dollar price, if not higher, due to said consumption taxes.

It's nigh-impossible to have true disposable income that your average Joe or plain Jane can use to dedicate to homebrew their personal projects in Brazil. And when it happens, it tends to in software form, since software still is relatively cheap to make.

People whose income in the top 25% bracket here make less in dollars than US's bottom 25% bracket, simple as that.

This is, of course also true of many many countries, which is why you usually don't hear about the new cool tech from Nigeria, Brazil, Bangladesh, Congo, etc. The people who are qualified enough tend to leave the country for better conditions. Of course, I'm not saying it's impossible, but people get surprised, just as you can see in this thread.

[jdahlin]

Brazil has the opposite of high taxes, especially for company owners. I remember paying 6% on income, compared to up to 70% in Sweden.

[matheusmoreira]

Import taxes in Brazil are 60%, plus something like 18% on top of the product, shipping and the aforementioned import taxes.

The result is a nearly 100% tax on computers and consumer electronics. One for you, one for the government.

That 6% figure is just the Simples Nacional rate for micro-businesses making less than 35kUSD/year. The actual income tax tops out at 27.5% at middle class thresholds. On top of that Brazil stacks social security tax, payroll taxes and a yet more taxes embedded in every single purchase. If you calculate all of this you can figure out something like up to 70% of a brazilian's income can flow to the government.

You say swedish companies pay 70% taxes. Well, swedish citizens get excellent services and a generally functioning country in return. Brazilian citizens pay 70% taxes and they get... Brazil.

[drdexebtjl]

This is very misleading. My salary in Brazil is on the very top end (with most of my income in the 27.5% bracket), and my average effective income tax rate in the last 5 years has been about 16%.

I'm not doing anything creative accounting-wise, I just max out my contributions to retirement accounts (PGBL) and get the correct tax deductions for all medical and education expenses.

We do have high import tariffs for individuals, and especially for consumer goods, as it's been pointed out in a different comment.

This does make it a very expensive country indeed if you want to live your life worshiping consumerism. But if you don't, you'll find that individuals don't really pay that much compared to other countries.

[mathattack]

Yes. Though even more than the US, their engineering talent from top schools heads into consulting and finance.

[cscheid]

Yes! That "prefeitura do Rio" huggingface URL is definitely shocking to read to this Brazilian as well (I'm assuming you and parent also are from your usernames).

[Aurornis]

> 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.

They merged the base model with another lab’s fine tuned model. The improvements could have come from getting some of the fine tuned weights from the other model.

If they really had a better performing model that they “accidentally” forgot to upload, they could have uploaded the correct file by now.

[croes]

Seems they did

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48529544

[ipieter]

I only see an edit to the readme (13h ago) and removal of the weights, so the repo is now empty.

I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, but we've seen this before: a model gets released that is supposedly state-of-the-art, yet seems to be a an other repackaged model without any training. Reflection 70B was the most similar example, all they now need is an api that rewrites "Claude" to "Rio".

[s1artibartfast]

My understanding is that they didnt do any distalation. Tevery weight is a 60/40 element wise average of QWEN and NEX. Is this possible if the rio contracter did thei own post-training as claimed?

https://x.com/tenobrus/status/2066243352211996728/photo/1

[motbus3]

It seems to me this is clearly a mistake. They would not even have the resources for it as far as I know and I think they are not even on a position to such bold claims.

[matheusmoreira]

Brazil could easily do it. Fine tuning requires some number of H100 cards. Trivial for the brazilian government. Existing brazilian labs are nothing compared to US hyperscalers but they do have enough capacity to fine tune Qwen. Santos Dumont has 248 H100s + 144 Grace Hoppers.

That's what makes this hilariously sad. Brazil could have done some good work here, but it just didn't. Brazil merged two models on a workstation.

[motbus3]

I've worked with infra resources in that region. The prices of hardware never made sense. Not sure if it's taxes or something, but I'm sure a poor city hall won't be able to afford 250 GPUs for R&D in cutting-edge tech.

[smus]

What do you mean World Cup debut? haven't they won 5?

[alxndresp]

They meant their first, opening game of this current World Cup tournament