Rio de Janeiro Built an AI Model That Beat DeepSeek—But Was Based on Someone Else's Work - Decrypt

Rio de Janeiro launches AI model rivaling ChatGPT, Claude

Rio de Janeiro's municipal IT company IplanRIO unveiled Rio 3.5 Open 397B—a 397-billion-parameter model fine-tuned on Alibaba's Qwen—which outperforms DeepSeek V4 and legacy ChatGPT/Claude in benchmarks. Signals that frontier AI competitiveness no longer requires massive training budgets: optimized open-source models now viable for governments and enterprises, reshaping the development landscape.