I like the [dead] comment theory that they proposed a huge LLM training budget to the government, kept most of the money, and released a cheap merge to justify the grift.

That's essentially Brazil's standard operating procedure. Wouldn't be surprising if that turned out to be the case.

Still, I'm actually impressed that this even happened at all. "Rio de Janeiro's homegrown LLM" is the last headline I expected to read on HN.

It's kinda weird to claim extraordinary results in such case though, as that brings a lot of eyes to it.