A city government funding a fine-tune of a model is interesting.

As for the benchmarks: If you spend any time playing with fine tunes of published models you know that benchmarks are gamed so much that they're a useless indicator of performance for models from small teams. It's too easy to fine tune a model to perform well on the benchmarks, release it, put a line on your resume saying you released a model that beat the major labs on benchmarks, and then try to use that to jump into a new job. The temptation is high.

There are a lot of fringe models and fine tunes that claim to have better performance on some benchmark. Then you try to use them and find they're often worse at general tasks than the base model.

I would wait and see if these results hold across other benchmarks. It's cool that the city is doing something with AI, but this is something where extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I doubt a small, previously unknown team has unlocked something secret that the team who made Qwen couldn't figure out. It's more likely it was fine tuned for a specific outcome (possibly these benchmarks) and performance in other areas was reduced as a consequence.

> A city government funding a fine-tune of a model is interesting.

Looks like it's an IT services government-owned company.

Most likely, they saw some business opportunity on selling it around for cities.

Indeed, this is all very true, I'd say it's true for the larger teams too, the entire ecosystem is so gamed by now that if you don't have your own private benchmarks with private test cases you haven't shared publicly, it's almost impossible to get a fair picture how well a model works, unless you actually sit down and use it.