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.
Regarding #2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48529544
This should be at the top: they uploaded the wrong model, they fixed it
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.
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.
Looks like they couldn't find the correct weights. https://x.com/IplanRio_rj/status/2066693494769348946
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.
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
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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).
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.
> Incorporating and getting a functional business entity in Brazil is harder
It’s still something you can do in less than a month. That’s nothing compared to the life of a functional enterprise.
For you to have to pay “years of salary” the employee must have been with you for a very long time - as in decades. Considering most companies don’t live to 2 years, the odds of it happening to you are very slim. Labor laws exist to protect the weak part against the possible abuses of the company. You must agree the harm a company can do to its employees is far greater than what an individual employee can do to a company. And this is why unions exist: because collectively is the only way the employees have teeth.
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.
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.
It was a business trip, but yeah.
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.
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.
> 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)
I live in Germany. No such thing as public hospitals. And I pay close to 1200€/month in health insurance to the public insurance company.
I quick visit to the dermatologist to check for some tiny bumps that showed up in my forehead: 60€, out of pocket, because the insurer doesn't cover it.
Sad to hear about that. Ireland is much better in that regard - you can pay for private healthcare and it'll provide you a broader network, but you might as well go for public health, where you'll be prioritized based on how life-threatening is your condition.
Yeah, I make it sound worse than it seems. The problem of the public insurance is that you pay based on your revenue instead of your actuarial risk, so in the end it should be treated as an extra form of revenue tax. I could go for the private insurance if I wanted to pay less, but then I'd have to switch my kids to the private insurer as well.
All in all, my point was only that the amount of taxes that people pay and quality of services are not necessarily related. Germany has high taxes and expensive-but-adequate healthcare. Greece has high taxes and expensive-and-inadequate healthcare. Switzerland has low taxes and universal/cheap healthcare (max. $5000/year deductible, max charge per hospitalization of $700).
> you pay based on your revenue instead of your actuarial risk
That's how public health works. It's the same as mortgage insurance in Brazil (where I come from), which is mandatory, and, since it's mandatory, it doesn't consider actuarial risk.
Doesn't make it right or morally virtuous.
There’s nothing virtuous in letting people die because they can’t afford medication or healthcare.
BTW, “right” and “wrong” are human constructs, so you are totally free to organise a society around the survival of the richest. It’s just not a society you’ll like living in.
You took a false dichotomy and jumped to an absurd conclusion. It makes you seem more concerned about an ideological position than thinking the problem through.
There are other ways to properly fund universal healthcare that does not involve creating artificial taxes:
- Increase the actual income taxes.
- Policies that mandate the allocation of revenue from vice and environmental taxes (alcohol, smoking, gambling, fossil fuels) to the health system.
- Social security reform. Pensions should not be an investment, only insurance. Turn pensions into an UBI program that has a hard cap.
- Supplemental and voluntary insurance plans to work on top of the existing public network. This might be risky as it can introduce a dual-class system, but (a) it's already the reality in most countries anyway and (b) could be avoided if the system is built around a "cafe sopezzo" [0] mechanism (the priority is given to you when you use the service, but redirected to non-paying members for the months when you don't)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caff%C3%A8_sospeso
Wow, 60 euro is cheap! Here in France it would be more like 150.
Ireland is in the same ballpark if you go private (insurance usually covers most of those €60).
If you go public, it’s free, but you’ll be in line based on the risk to your life, so it might be a long while. You really don’t want to check in to a public hospital and get an MRI right away because that means whatever you have is really, really bad.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 60% (II) with 18% (ICMS) on top for a total of +88%
Nope. ICMS is calculated "por dentro". It's base / (1 - rate), not base * rate.
That's +95.12% tax. Also known as nearly 100% tax. One for me, one for the government.> The tariffs for commercial importations are much lower and depend on the part.
Fair point, but they're sure as hell not "much" lower. As you yourself noted, they are still high, and obviously those companies are going to want to add their own margins on top.
> 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.
And, in the meantime, they help push for more "grift-friendly" politicians. For them, it's a win-win situation.
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.
For some definition of "manufacturing". More like final assembly. Brazil hasn't attempted to create its own computer technology since the military dictatorship. For example, there are no brazilian semiconductor fabs that would be even remotely competitive with the current state of the art.
Brazil has the opposite of high taxes, especially for company owners. I remember paying 6% on income, compared to up to 70% in Sweden.
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.
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.
> This is very misleading.
It's your comment that's misleading. I was trying to account for the numberless taxes that exist and get applied to every single transaction. You zeroed in on income taxes then stacked some deductions on top.
> tax deductions
Discounting deductions from the nominal tax rate doesn't change the fact those taxes are high, nor does it change the fact you max out your tax bracket at middle class incomes.
Deductions are actually the bare minimum. If you're using them, it means the state failed to provide you with proper education and health services, forcing you to spend money on things that are theoretically your constitutional rights. Not deducting these expenses would be robbery. The fact most brazilians have plenty of deductions at their disposal is only evidence of how absurdly tax inefficient this country is.
These deductions aren't automatic either, you have to spend time and effort accounting for all of this so that you can make the government give back some of the money it took from you. Time is money, so this is just yet another stealthy tax.
Finally, other countries no doubt have deductions too. I know for a fact that the US does, and european countries almost certainly do too. Accounting for these will probably only make Brazil look even worse by comparison.
> This does make it a very expensive country indeed if you want to live your life worshiping consumerism.
What a dismissive comment.
US government just banned Fable for foreign peasants like us. If you want a computer that can properly run LLMs locally, you're going to be forced to shell out money in the 40-100kBRL range. Computers are in the same price range as cars now.
If you think having some degree of sovereignty over our computing is "worshipping consumerism", then I don't know what to say to you.
Europe is currently fighting tooth and nail to develop some technological independence. China is creating Manhattan projects to catch up to the west in semiconductor manufacturing and kick them out of their supply chains. If we keep up these nonsense taxes, AI will be just yet another area where Brazil is half a century behind.
Brazil taxes foreign products in order to "protect local industry", then it taxes the local industry as well, which means pretty much nothing higher up in the value chain gets made here. Brazilian efforts at creating national computer technology date back to the military dictatorship, to the import substitution policies. The same time period that birthed Lua, in fact. What have we been doing since then? Nothing. Don't have our own industries, and we can't really buy the products produced by other nations either. This is why people leave: Brazil combines the worst of both worlds.
> You zeroed in on income taxes then stacked some deductions on top.
You're the one that brought up a comically inflated 70% number as if it were realistic. You can't act as if the nominal rate is the effective rate, then complain when I bring up numbers based on the effective rate.
> If you're using them, it means the state failed to provide you with proper education and health services, forcing you to spend money on things that are theoretically your constitutional rights.
No, it means I'm picky about my doctors. You seem to have ignored the tax-advantaged retirements accounts, though.
> These deductions aren't automatic either, you have to spend time and effort accounting for all of this so that you can make the government give back some of the money it took from you. Time is money, so this is just yet another stealthy tax.
You just need to ask for receipts and put them in a (digital) folder. Then you spend 5 minutes tops _per *year*_ reporting their sums on your tax forms. If that's not enough, most of the numbers are pre-filled for you, you just have to review it. And you can download past receipts from the federal government's website.
> I know for a fact that the US does, and european countries almost certainly do too. Accounting for these will probably only make Brazil look even worse by comparison.
Then do it. Tax legislation is very different across countries and even municipalities. Comparing nominal tax rates is completely meaningless. You need to compare the effective tax rate.
> If you want a computer that can properly run LLMs locally, you're going to be forced to shell out money in the 40-100kBRL range. Computers are in the same price range as cars now.
What part of that is due to an increase in taxes? Hardware prices have skyrocketed around the world due to limited supply. In fact, there's a record high number of computer hardware parts in the most recent list of products exempt of import taxes.
> If we keep up these nonsense taxes, AI will be just yet another area where Brazil is half a century behind.
Our government is doing exactly that. The latest project in discussion in the Senate will give import tax exemptions and export tax exemptions to data center projects that reserve 10% capacity to the national market, invest 2% locally in R&D, and use clean energy. I think these numbers are ridiculously small.
If we had lower import taxes on data center hardware, how else would the government negotiate with data center companies to reserve capacity for our national interests?
Finally, I think it's a bit silly to think that _you and me_ running agentic coding LLMs at home furthers national interests. It does not. It furthers our hobbies. It's not even the kind of hobby that gives you relevant career experience which then goes on to strengthen our industry.
> The same time period that birthed Lua, in fact.
Lua was created in 1993 in a lab doing research for Petrobrás. I happened to graduate from PUC-Rio, so I know this personally: the Computer Science labs are receiving much more funding nowadays than they did in 1993. They're still cranking out excellent research, and, if I may say so myself, excellent alumni as well.
> What have we been doing since then? Nothing.
- Our electronic voting system; - Pix, the largest and most popular payment network in the world; - Elixir, LangFlow, Neovim, just to name a few that you probably know about.
> You're the one that brought up a comically inflated 70% number as if it were realistic.
Nothing "comically inflated" about it. That's pretty much the upper bound. It's not just income taxes, we've got property taxes, vehicle taxes, financial taxes, not to mention taxes on consumption, especially fuel, electronics, telecommunications, food, clothing, medicine, you name it. Employment taxes also reduce potential salaries. The brazilian doesn't have any savings. Sum all of this up, it can definitely reach 60% to 70% of income.
> You can't act as if the nominal rate is the effective rate, then complain when I bring up numbers based on the effective rate.
You dismissed entire categories of taxes in one fell swoop then started hedging with some deductions. Come on now.
> No, it means I'm picky about my doctors.
What, SUS not good enough? Of course not.
> You seem to have ignored the tax-advantaged retirements accounts, though.
Because it's tax deferral, not tax deduction. You're still gonna get taxed. You're basically claiming you're saving money by using credit cards. Brazil has no equivalent to the american Roth IRA either.
> You just need to ask for receipts and put them in a (digital) folder.
So... Time and effort. Multiplied by every deductible transaction. Plus the cost of actually learning how to deal with all this nonsense in the first place.
I know how much my time is worth. Even if it were "five minutes tops", it would definitely be a tax. And it absolutely isn't "five minutes tops".
> Then do it.
OK. Data from OECD's Taxing Wages 2026 provides total tax as % of labor cost figures.
Brazil is not in this dataset. Add INSS + employer contributions and Brazil can definitely reach the ~34-39% range, which by itself is already comparable to or exceeds the OECD average. USA is at around ~30%.However, Brazil actually shifts most of its taxes onto consumption. It leads the world in that particular tax burden: ~12.5% of GDP, roughly double the OECD average, ~56% of total revenue. Add that and we're in the ~49-55% range.
Meanwhile, Brazil ranks literally dead last in the world's most-taxed countries on welfare return to citizens. Literally 30th out of 30. It collects taxes at European levels and delivers developing country services. Europe has world class schools, healthcare, infrastructure. Brazil has drug gangs that dominate vast swaths of our territory and which perpetrate more homicides than active war zones. Quite the quality of life.
> Lua was created in 1993 in a lab doing research for Petrobrás.
And Reserva de Mercado was in force from 1977 to 1992. Petrobras had to follow strict rules under these restrictions, which included software acquisition. This directly drove the creation of Lua and Lua's predecessors DEL and SOL.
Lua is a direct child of the policies of the brazilian military dictatorship. Born from the constraints they imposed.
> What part of that is due to an increase in taxes?
The part where half of the price we pay is taxes. On top of the global shortage price increases.
> In fact, there's a record high number of computer hardware parts in the most recent list of products exempt of import taxes.
No. GECEX 852 (2026-02-04) actually raised taxes on 1252 IT/capital goods. What you're citing are the follow up tax exemption requests. Which only exist because of the tax hike. Which only apply to companies with actual industry projects. You and me won't see a dime out of this.
> just to name a few that you probably know about
Brazil does not have a single competitive semiconductor fab. No actual computer technology to speak of. Half a century behind China, to say nothing of the US. Electronic voting machines are commodity hardware, just assemblies of somebody else's computers with Linux and some custom software on top. Pix is the only brazilian achievement on your list that's impressive, and even that is still completely dependent on foreign technology.
> Elixir, LangFlow, Neovim
First you say that individuals doing cool things is irrelevant to the national interest. You just dismiss it all as hobby tier. Then you cite open source projects by individuals as evidence of Brazil's strength? Which is it?
Not the kind of hobby that gives you career experience? Ridiculous.
> I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)
Linus Torvalds, 1991. Need I say more?
I'm going to say more.
The demoscene influenced the games industry. Minecraft was made by a single guy just messing around. Bought for 2.5 billion. Tim Sweeney built ZZT, became Epic games, led to Unreal Engine, also drew heavily from the home computer scene, as anyone who ever played Unreal Tournament knows. Wozniak built the Apple I to show off at the Homebrew Computer Club, a hobbyist club. Trillion dollar company. Facebook was once a literal campus dorm room project. Linus wrote git in 10 days to scratch an itch. Fabrice Bellard built ffmpeg. Python was Guido's christmas break project.
Individual computing capability is the seedbed of national computing capability. Everything is a throwaway toy joke project, until it goes into production and starts making money.
The brazilian government is not furthering the national interest. It's holding it back.
Yes. Though even more than the US, their engineering talent from top schools heads into consulting and finance.
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).
> 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.
Seems they did
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48529544
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".
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
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.
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.
What do you mean World Cup debut? haven't they won 5?
They meant their first, opening game of this current World Cup tournament