Open source and on device: the strategy behind Nvidia’s new AI models

Amid the accelerating race between open and closed AI, the vendor advanced its open source line of attack with more open models.

Nvidia earlier this week introduced Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, a 120-billion-parameter model that it said delivers fast-track completion, or the ability for an AI model to complete a task nearly instantly, and accuracy with "always on" agents.

Along with that top-of-the-line model, Nvidia released Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B 24GB and Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB. The 64B version is optimized for balance and speed, while the E4B is designed for conversational agents.

All three models are fully open, with Nvidia releasing their weights, datasets and training recipes. The release comes after Nvidia released another fully open model, Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, in August.

The new models are available on Hugging Face. They are the first models Nvidia has released since it agreed to acquire the open source AI platform last month. The release highlights how the open model paradigm has evolved over the past few years since Meta first released its Llama open-weight model family.

In recent years, open models have grown markedly larger, highlighted by Meta's 405-billion-parameter Llama model, introduced in 2024.

"What we think of as small models has gotten quite bigger,” said Alexander Harrowell, an analyst at Omdia, a division of Informa TechTarget.

He added that this change should benefit enterprises, because they can better fine-tune and customize models. Moreover, enterprises now enjoy access to more models and more open models are on the market, allowing for better competition.

Nvidia and open source

With the release of the latest Nemotron models, Nvidia is sustaining its backing of open source initiatives and continues to lead the campaign in the U.S. AI market to develop open models to better compete with low-cost, high-performance Chinese open-weight models.

“They’re doing this to support the wider ecosystem around their GPUs,” he said.