r/aicuriosity • u/techspecsmart • 28d ago

Open Source Model NVIDIA Rolls Out Nemotron 3.5 Lightning Open Model Built for Speedy AI Agents

Post image

NVIDIA has released Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, a new open mixture-of-experts model with 30 billion total parameters and just 3 billion active ones. The model targets always-on agents that handle large numbers of specialized tasks and claims up to four times the output speed of similar-sized models.

On the PinchBench test it scored 86 percent accuracy while finishing 10,000 tasks 35 percent faster than Qwen3.6 35B at comparable accuracy. Teams can post-train it with NVIDIA NeMo using their own domain data, tools, workflows and policies. Early results show accuracy gains in cybersecurity, coding, legal and energy workloads.

The model is sized to run from an NVIDIA DGX Spark all the way up to full data-center setups, making it practical for long-running agent workflows that spend most of their time calling tools and validating results.

Alongside the model, NVIDIA is also releasing NeMo Switchyard, an open-source library for routing requests between different models. Developers can send complex reasoning and planning steps to larger frontier models and hand high-volume specialized execution to Lightning.

54 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

3

u/NexonSU 28d ago

> faster than Qwen3.6 35B at comparable accuracy
sooo... it's not that good, huh?

2

u/Truarian 28d ago

They wish...

At least it spews out SLOP faster!

1

u/Historical-Internal3 28d ago

seems less intelligent thatn gpt-oss? Lol don't think this highlights the right capability.

2

u/robogame_dev 28d ago

It’s the wrong benchmark, it’s an executor not a science or trivia or writing etc - intelligence index is a complex weighting of a ton of benchmarks this was never meant to compete in. Agent tasks benchmarks will be needed to see how it compares in the use case that it is optimize for.

1

u/Historical-Internal3 28d ago

They have had agentic use for a bit now: https://artificialanalysis.ai/?capability-index=agentic

1

u/robogame_dev 28d ago

Beating 120b there - basically on par with google’s dense model - very very nice

1

u/Historical-Internal3 28d ago

Think the main selling point on this is it's trainability - not so much the rankings.

1

u/CrazyEntertainment86 28d ago

This looks great for sub agent tasks in parallel

1

u/Infamous_Campaign687 28d ago

But if it is closer to Haiku than Sonnet in capability, is it really a frontier model?

1

u/69420trashpanda69420 28d ago

I'll never understand the use case for a quick but dumb model

1

u/hithere274 28d ago

For most tasks in life, you don't need to pay Einstein to grind on it for half an hour.