NVIDIA ships Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, a 30B MoE built for agent loops, plus NeMo Switchyard routing that cuts task cost to a third of Opus 4.8
NVIDIA released Nemotron 3.5 Lightning on August 11 — a 30-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts open model claiming up to 4x faster output and 30% faster agentic task completion versus comparable models, aimed at the high-volume, narrow roles inside multi-agent systems (code review, tool use, security monitoring, billing triage). Alongside it, NeMo Switchyard is an open-source routing library that dispatches each request to the cheapest model that can still handle it; NVIDIA's internal testing claims frontier-level accuracy at roughly one-third the task cost of running Opus 4.8 alone. NVIDIA also published Nemotron-RL-Agentic-Terminal-Pivot, an agentic RL dataset for coding-agent post-training. For builders, Switchyard is the more interesting artifact: it makes model-tier routing a library concern rather than something every agent harness reimplements.
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