IplanRIO releases Rio 3.5 Open 397B free on Hugging Face
Technology
Rio de Janeiro just dropped its own AI model, Rio 3.5 Open 397B, and it's making waves for beating some older versions of ChatGPT and Claude in performance tests.
Built by the city's tech team, IplanRIO, this massive model is free to use on Hugging Face thanks to an MIT license, so anyone can check it out.
Rio shows cities' open source independence
Rio 3.5 started with Alibaba's Qwen framework but got a serious upgrade from IplanRIO through custom tweaks and a new reasoning system.
The timing is interesting too: as US companies limit access to advanced AI, Rio shows how cities can use open-source tools to build powerful tech without depending on global giants.