This is a ridiculously wrong framing because this supposedly frontier AI by the IT department of Rio de Janeiro **is Qwen**! So it's not "making Qwen fade into irrelevance"...
You just need to read the HuggingFace page this guy linked 👇 (
huggingface.co/prefeitura-ri…): "Rio 3.5 Open 397B is built upon the exceptional work of the Qwen Team and their Qwen 3.5 model family... [it is] post-trained from Qwen 3.5 397B."
So no, you didn't have a municipal IT department in Brazil somehow leapfrog the frontier: they were able to do this precisely because Chinese open-source models exist. They stood on the frontier, that's the whole point.
Which, incidentally, is yet another very concrete illustration of what Chinese open-source AI means for the Global South: it lets a city government in Brazil build, customize, and own its own AI capabilities instead of renting them from Silicon Valley at exorbitant prices.
With US models, the municipal IT department of Rio wouldn't be releasing its own frontier model: they'd be writing checks to OpenAI or Anthropic and hoping they don't somehow get cut off or restricted for political reasons.