Tomorrow NVIDIA will publish Nemotron 3 Ultra, which will be the biggest open weights LLM from a US company (550B parameters).

The early testers have confirmed that it is much better than all earlier US open weights models, but it is not as good as the best Chinese open weights models.

While Nemotron 3 Ultra is not the smartest open weights LLM, it is well optimized for fast inference, so it is much faster than the other LLMs of the same size.

In any case I believe that it is very good to have an additional option in big open weights LLMs, because until now all existing models have shown that even if some model is definitely better on average than another, the weaker model can still be better in some particular applications.

With open weights models, you can afford to try multiple LLMs for the more important tasks and then choose the best solution.

:(

I was hoping Microsoft would make it open weights, as they have done for years with the Phi models.

The era of big tech releasing models into the wild might be over, which IMO is counter-productive, as we are shifting from "the model is the product" to "the harness is the product"