Comment by matheusmoreira
1 day ago
I'm honestly impressed that this even happened at all. "Rio de Janeiro's homegrown LLM" is probably the last headline I ever expected to read on HN.
1 day ago
I'm honestly impressed that this even happened at all. "Rio de Janeiro's homegrown LLM" is probably the last headline I ever expected to read on HN.
Worth reminding everyone that Lua was also created in Rio, though admittedly at PUC rather than by the government.
Rio has a strong engineering talent pool, along with many other major capitals in Brazil
Brazil does have talent. Mauro Carvalho Chehab is a Linux kernel maintainer. Elixir was created by José Valim, a brazilian. I have also created my own programming language.
What Brazil doesn't have is a history of properly rewarding talent, which often causes it to migrate elsewhere. So it's definitely surprising when any sort of technological development happens in Brazil: it implies someone who stayed managed to get something done, most likely for much less than what that something is actually worth, while also being crushed by extremely high taxes that essentially doubles the cost of computer hardware.
> extremely high taxes that essentially doubles the cost of computer hardware.
I think people are missing the last few words -- cost of computing hardware
when I used to do ISP work I did a lot for LATAM. The joke was that you'd get better bandwidth for Brazil routing out of the country and through Miami than going across the country. The reason? crazy high tariffs on hardware.
No reason to base anything locally, and if you're not basing it locally then there isn't really much reason to stick around, either. Go to other hot markets like Zona America, Austin, CDMX, Miami, Los Angeles, etc. and make the big $$$.
I worked with 2 Brazilian engineers who were in country (and currently work with a 3rd now, based in Monteal) and they were very good but all said they had to get out of country to lock in the serious engineering roles.
> extremely high taxes
I always find this funny. Brazilian taxes are nowhere near what I would say “high”. I pay about twice as much out of my compensation as I would pay in Brazil, and that would be as if I did zero tax optimisation back then.
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Brazil has the opposite of high taxes, especially for company owners. I remember paying 6% on income, compared to up to 70% in Sweden.
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Yes. Though even more than the US, their engineering talent from top schools heads into consulting and finance.
Yes! That "prefeitura do Rio" huggingface URL is definitely shocking to read to this Brazilian as well (I'm assuming you and parent also are from your usernames).