Posted by unrvl22 2 hours ago
I find it amazing how robust the current deep learning models are. A simple linear combination of every weight did not degrade the performance of the model, but enhanced it.
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.
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?
I might be missing something, but I don’t see anyone defending the the scams.
They can both be bad.
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.
Then researchers looked at the weights and there is no post training at all.
They are now attributing both models they merged, but their excuse for the lack of post training is to claim they accidentally uploaded the wrong files.
But yes, in general, merging refers to techniques that directly blend the weights of different models mathematically. It had a big moment of popularity ~2 years ago, with many so-called "Frankenmodels" popping up on leaderboards.
I tend to think of merging as belonging to the same general umbrella as things like "abliteration", or other techniques that surgically modify the weights of a model without a traditional training/tuning loop. Maxime Labonne is a great person to follow if you're interested in this general area.
>The model is built via a merge of https://huggingface.co/nex-agi/Nex-N2-Pro and https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, proceeded by On-Policy Distillation from a stronger model. We detected an incorrect upload in the previous version, where the base merged version was upload instead of the final distilled model. We are sorry for the confusion and apologize profusely.
Incidentally are people using Github issues as blogs now?
Whether that’s right, prosocial, or professional is up for debate (as well as if any single definition of etiquette can be expected in 2026 on an issue tracker).
But surely you can see the optics reason why someone would take their complaint to the repo directly? It pressures the maintainers to respond, it allows for a pile on from the internet, and makes any decision to lock down a hostile thread into its own kind of statement.
The maintainers should absolutely post an official response and lock the thread though, it will likely get ugly in there.
The majority of their politicians have ties to organized crime. There is a virtual revolving door between police and crime, where people migrate from one to the other.
It is like Chicago in the 20s, Naples and Medelin in the 80s or Moscow today.
-- Bill Gates
> Bill Gates had somehow manifested, alone, surrounded by ten Apple employees. … Steve started yelling at Bill, asking him why he violated their agreement.
And what’s more interesting is the conclusion:
> Apple filed a monumental copyright lawsuit against Microsoft in 1988, but they eventually lost on a technicality (the judge ruled that Apple inadvertently gave Microsoft a perpetual license to the Mac user interface in November 1985).
Microsoft didn’t steal Apple’s GUI … Apple gave it to them.