NVIDIA has just released Nemotron 3 Ultra, the new most intelligent US open weights model, with leading speed for its intelligence
Nemotron 3 Ultra scores 47.7 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, well ahead of the next strongest US open weights models, Gemma 4 31B (39.2), Nemotron 3 Super (36.0) and gpt-oss-120b (33.3), but behind the Chinese-led open weights frontier (Kimi K2.6 at 53.9).
We partnered with
@NVIDIA to evaluate this model for intelligence and speed ahead of its public release. These figures use the final NVFP4 weights that NVIDIA recommends for inference, but our tests show minimal intelligence impact compared to BF16 testing, with higher precision resulting in an Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index score of 48.2 vs. the NVFP4 score of 47.7.
Key Takeaways:
➤ Nemotron 3 Ultra leads in speed for its intelligence: through BlackBox AI ahead of release, Nemotron 3 Ultra is served at over 400 output tokens per second - this is slightly faster than the typical serving speed of gpt-oss-120b despite being >4X larger, and comes with significantly greater intelligence
➤ Largest Nemotron 3 model so far: with approximately 550 billion total parameters and 55 billion active, Nemotron 3 Ultra is significantly larger than its siblings and is the largest and most intelligent US open weights model release ever
➤ Nemotron 3 Ultra is the leading US open weights model on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence and Agentic Indexes by far, but Gemma 4 31B scores ~1 point higher on the Coding Index (comprised of Terminal-Bench Hard and SciCode)