Nemotron Cascade 2 30B-A3B: NVIDIA's Hidden MoE Beats Qwen3.5-35B and Its Own 120B Super on Benchmarks

r/LocalLLaMA·high signal

A 267-upvote r/LocalLLaMA thread spotlights NVIDIA's Nemotron Cascade 2 (30B total, 3B active parameters) as an underappreciated open model that outperforms Qwen3.5-35B-A3B on AIME 2025 (92.4 vs 91.9), LiveCodeBench v6 (87.2 vs 74.6), and ArenaHard v2 (83.5 vs 65.4). It also surpasses the larger Nemotron-3-Super-120B released just 9 days prior. Available on Ollama and HuggingFace under open license with a full technical report.