Nvidia's new Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is a compact open-weights model that matches OpenAI's gpt-oss-120b on intelligence benchmarks with a quarter of the parameters while delivering the fastest inference speeds in its class.
Nvidia has released Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, the first model in its new Nemotron 3.5 lineup. The model directly succeeds the Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B and keeps its hybrid Mamba-Transformer architecture, with 31.6 billion total parameters and only 3.6 billion active at any given time.
According to the independent benchmarking platform Artificial Analysis, the model scores 24 on the Intelligence Index, a nine-point jump from its predecessor (15). That puts Lightning on par with OpenAI's gpt-oss-120b (24) and just behind Nvidia's own Nemotron 3 Super (26), which is about four times larger. The smartest small models in the same size class, like Qwen3.6 35B A3B (32) and Meta's new Muse Glimmer (35), still hold a clear lead.
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning scores 24 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, tying with gpt-oss-120b. | Image: Artificial Analysis
Nvidia is targeting a different spot on the efficiency frontier with Lightning. In pre-release tests using the final NVFP4 weights, the model hits nearly 670 tokens per second, the highest measured throughput among all compared models and almost twice as fast as Google's Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite (386 tokens/s). A task from the Intelligence Index takes about 0.5 minutes to complete, while Qwen3.6 35B A3B needs around 3.5 minutes, and Gemma 4 31B takes roughly 5.8 minutes.
