Rio de Janeiro's municipal AI company IplanRIO released Rio-3.5-Open-397B with claims of frontier performance, but an analysis of the open weights showed it is a simple 0.6/0.4 element-wise merge of Nex-N2_pro and Qwen3.5-397B-A17B. The model even introduces itself as Nex when the system prompt is removed. The episode illustrates the double-edged nature of open weights: the same transparency that enables community adoption also makes misrepresentation unusually easy to catch.
VS Code 1.118, released April 29, silently turned on automatic Copilot co-authorship for git commits by changing git.addAICoAuthor from "off" to "all" by default. The feature has bugs — it fires even when AI features are disabled — and has already stamped 4M+ GitHub commits with a non-human co-author, surfacing awkward questions about copyright ownership that the US Copyright Office has already answered.
A technical reverse-engineering of ChatGPT's ad delivery system shows how OpenAI injects ads directly into the SSE conversation stream and closes attribution via four Fernet-encrypted tokens and a merchant-side JavaScript SDK — a fully first-party ad stack that bypasses any third-party intermediary.
