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.
But it's impossible to form a nuanced opinion when political association has a higher priority than the facts; which, again, don't look flattering for the implementers.
In the early days of Llama there were a lot of experiments like this. There were even some interesting combinations of models where they stacked layers of different models together or even added more layers with interesting results.
But announcing that you spliced two models together isn't very impressive in 2026, so they announced that they had done their own post training and outdid the big labs. They thought nobody would look close enough to notice.
Scroll past the first issue to find it. It’s further down.
(It's not news to anyone who has worked in sales-led businesses that salespeople are prone to believing the claims of other salespeople, I guess).
The model card says:
> Post-trained from Qwen 3.5 397B
The model card also says that they use an inference framework based on "SwiReasoning: Switch-Thinking in Latent and Explicit for Pareto-Superior Reasoning LLMs" by Shi et al.:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05069
So the sources seem properly attributed.
They only claim that what they did to "Qwen 3.5 397B" has improved the LLM, including, as expected, with "strong performance in Portuguese".
There (is/was) no attribution to Nex team (they've released a model based on Qwen 3.5 397B as well).
As per OP link Nex claims that what Rio team released (so far) is just linear interpolation of weights between Nex and OG Qwen model. With no attribution to Nex and zero signs of Rio doing any training of their own.
> An open AI model trained in Rio with public funding over the last year by @Prefeitura_Rio surpassing all other models.
You'll have to let me know when that finally happens, because that ain't now.
A child caught doing something bad will cry "but my friends also did it!", is that the level of reasoning hackers want to be at?
They can both be bad.
I might be missing something, but I don’t see anyone defending the the scams.
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 understand how the internet works and how people respond to others in this type of setting, but the comment I replied to did not in any way make the point I was making about the disproportionate nature of relative contributions.