Nemotron
Nvidia's family of open-weight language models, tuned for speed and efficiency rather than maximum intelligence.
Nemotron is Nvidia’s own line of language models, released with open weights so anyone can download and run them. The strategy behind them is unusual for a chip company: instead of chasing the highest benchmark scores, Nvidia builds models that do a lot of small steps very quickly and cheaply, which is exactly what an AI agent working through a long task needs.
Nvidia researchers have argued in public that models under 10 billion parameters can handle most agent workloads about as well as models many times larger, at a small fraction of the cost. Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, released in August 2026, is the clearest example so far: it matches a model four times its size on intelligence scores while producing close to 670 tokens per second, the fastest in its comparison group.