Rio 3.5 Open 397B: A City Government Just Shipped a Frontier AI Model
The city government of Rio de Janeiro just released a frontier-class open AI model. It is built to go head to head with the best open systems on the planet. Rio 3.5 Open 397B comes from IplanRIO, the municipal IT company that runs Rio de Janeiro’s digital services. On its own benchmarks it edges out Alibaba’s Qwen 3.7 Plus on several tests, though the open-weight benchmark crown now belongs to GLM 5.2. That is not a typo. A city hall shipped a 397-billion-parameter model under a fully open license. Here is the honest version of the story. Rio 3.5 Open 397B is not built from scratch. It is fine-tuned from […]
