Global AI "Dark Horse Myth" Overnight Reversal: Accused of Being a Rip-off of Alibaba's Qwen

Odaily Planet Daily News: The "official" open-source model Rio-3.5-Open-397B, launched by IplanRIO, an IT company under the Rio de Janeiro city government, went viral globally and was hailed as a new force in Latin American open-source large models. Within less than 24 hours, this so-called AI "dark horse myth" was overturned, as the model was accused of being a weight-mixed version, a "shell wrapper" for Alibaba's Qwen3.5 and NexN2Pro.

Currently, IplanRIO has publicly apologized on the open-source community Hugging Face, admitting to an "operational error" that resulted in the upload of a merged baseline version intended for comparison. The open-source model team Nex-AGI publicly accused that this model from Rio de Janeiro shows no trace of training by Rio itself, and what is claimed as a self-developed model is essentially a weight-mixed version of NexN2Pro and Qwen3.5-397B-A17B. (HuggingFace)