Hacker News

This is an open weights model based on other open weights models.

The dispute is that they released it with claims about having done some post training that improved the outputs. It was discovered that the model was not post trained like they claimed.

The HF page now says it’s a merge of models, which wasn’t there before. They’re trying to claim they accidentally uploaded the wrong model to HF and that they’ll upload the real one soon.

Basically, they thought they could splice two open weights models together and claim their team had accomplished some amazing post training, but they weren’t smart enough to realize that other researchers would discover that there wasn’t any post training.

This is a pure scam on tax payer money. But what else would be expected?

Attribution isn't the relevant part. Lying about your lab's capabilities is.

Are you new to the latest AI hype cycle? /s

"Their work"? First you had the original content creators that did 99.99% of the work. Then you had the US companies bundle it up into a frontier LLM. Then "they" did the "work" of using the US model as a foundation for their own. So in the sense of doing 0.00001% of the actual work that went into their product, sure.

I'd say it's more like someone forking a Linux distro, adding a few themes and fonts, and then complaining when someone else forks their distro and adds another theme.

I didn't know model merging like that was possible. (Obviously possible from a pure software standpoint but I'm surprised it's effective)

So the problem isn’t in the missing attribution to Qwen, but with the fact that they didn’t mention Nex-N2 Pro right?

lmao i really hope this is a real quote cuz it’s a banger

You just described every single vibe coder...

I wouldn’t describe what happened here as incompetence. As a “carioca”, I am pleasantly surprised to know that the government’s IT department is involved in AI work — even without the budget to create its own models from scratch.

Why would they care? They get their salaries and pensions and bonuses, and the tax payer is footing the bill.

I imagine it'd work the same as merging all the good-tasting foods to get an even tastier one

most merge improve a small subset of "feeling" benchmark (too small, too specific, or out of distribution) and tend to show degradation on actual benchmark, with especially punishing result on long chain benchmarks.

also only work on matching architectures (i.e. finetunes/loras of the same model)

that kinda worked in llama 1/2 era, not between different models but between finetunes of the same model. the briefly legendary Mythomax was IIRC a merge of 5+ tunes, some of which were merges themselves.

No, they need the same arch, but you can distill them into a single model. And yes, if you use the API directly Claude will often say it’s an open weight model (likely the ones it was distilled from)

The allegation here is that it's not actually a fine-tune of Qwen, but instead an undisclosed mashup (merge) of someone else's fine-tune of Qwen and the original model. Rio subsequently said that the model was in fact a merge, that they did additional fine-tuning after the merge, and that they accidentally uploaded the base merge instead of the version with additional fine-tuning. But this seems like quite an oversight...