Global AI "Dark Horse Myth" Overturned Overnight: Accused of Being a Shell for Alibaba's Qwen

Odaily reports that the "official" open-source model Rio-3.5-Open-397B, launched by IplanRIO, an IT company under the Rio de Janeiro City Government, has gained global popularity and been hailed as a rising force in Latin American open-source large models. Within less than 24 hours, this so-called AI "dark horse myth" was reversed, as the model was accused of being a "shell" version that is a weight-mixed variant of Alibaba's Qwen3.5 and NexN2Pro.

Currently, IplanRIO has publicly apologized on the open-source community Hugging Face, admitting that an "operational error" led to the upload of a merged baseline version used for comparison. The open-source model team Nex-AGI has publicly alleged that this Rio model shows no traces of training by Rio itself, and that the so-called self-developed model is essentially a weight-mixed version of NexN2Pro and Qwen3.5-397B-A17B. (HuggingFace)