News linked to both this project and an event.
the Brazilian Federal Police, in Operation Commodity, have cracked down on a drug trafficking gang that laundered money through cryptocurrency. Since 2021, the gang has smuggled over 6.5 tons of cocaine to Europe via the Port of Rio de Janeiro, hiding the drugs in shipments of coffee, cement, and mortar. The operation covered the states of São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Santa Catarina, and Espírito Santo. Police executed 13 preventive arrest warrants and 44 search and seizure warrants. The court ordered the seizure of assets and the freezing of up to 1 billion Brazilian reais, approximately $196 million. According to police, the gang is linked to the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and Comando Vermelho (CV), and laundered money through a luxury car dealership in the Greater São Paulo area and shell companies. The dealership in question sold vehicles such as Ferrari, Porsche, Corvette, and Land Rover. Those involved used shell companies to issue invoices lacking supporting documentation, funneling drug trafficking proceeds into the Brazilian financial system and using cryptocurrencies to conceal transactions. The suspects will face charges including transnational criminal organization, international drug trafficking, and money laundering.
the "official" open-source model Rio-3.5-Open-397B, launched by IplanRIO, an IT company under the Rio de Janeiro City Government, has gained global popularity and been hailed as a rising force in Latin American open-source large models. Within less than 24 hours, this so-called AI "dark horse myth" was reversed, as the model was accused of being a "shell" version that is a weight-mixed variant of Alibaba's Qwen3.5 and NexN2Pro.Currently, IplanRIO has publicly apologized on the open-source community Hugging Face, admitting that an "operational error" led to the upload of a merged baseline version used for comparison. The open-source model team Nex-AGI has publicly alleged that this Rio model shows no traces of training by Rio itself, and that the so-called self-developed model is essentially a weight-mixed version of NexN2Pro and Qwen3.5-397B-A17B. (HuggingFace)