18 August 2026
NVIDIA releases model optimized for faster, cheaper inference
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning uses sparse mixture of experts, a technique where only parts of the model activate per query, reducing computational cost.
- The model combines multiple efficiency methods built into its core design, rather than applying speed improvements as an afterthought to an existing model.
- This signals a shift where companies are designing models from scratch with inference speed and cost as primary constraints, not secondary optimizations.
How it was covered
Latent Spaceswyx & Alessio
Models like Nemotron 3.5 Lightning are optimized at the architecture level with sparse MoE, multi-token prediction, and speculative decoding, not just through quantization. The newsletter notes this represents a shift in how efficiency is approached.