// ZDNET — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
Nvidia's open Nemotron 3.5 Lightning model is all about specialized, local agentic AI
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AI labs are shipping new models nonstop. Besides being better and faster than their predecessors, not every new model is guaranteed to be a major step change, despite how the company's PR may wax poetic about them. Model strengths really emerge in context: Where are competitor models lacking or excelling? Which models have outstanding specialties, and which are just catching up to industry standards?
Our Model Release Tracker helps you make sense of where models stand relative to each other and whether they're worth a deeper look. While we don't test every model or model update on this list, we'll always include the key elements you need to know, along with our hands-on expert test, where applicable. We also include an Expert Score for certain models. Curious about how we test AI? Check out this breakdown of our process.
Here are the biggest model releases of 2026 so far and what to know about them. We'll update this list whenever a notable new model arrives.
What it does: Nvidia framed its new model, part of its existing Nemotron 3 family, as a go-to workhorse for "high-volume" agentic tasks. Faster than similar models and customizable, it's geared toward specialized jobs, which it can target more directly alongside NeMo Switchyard, a new routing library Nvidia released with the model. With "the knowledge of Ultra packed into the size of Nano," as generative AI VP Kari Briski said during a briefing, Nemotron 3.5 Lightning can also run locally for better security.
Also: As Meta fades in open-source AI, Nvidia senses its chance to lead
Why it matters: Timing is everything with this release. Nvidia and even proprietary-first AI companies like OpenAI are pushing open-weight models more than ever, amidst recent security incidents. Meta also just released Muse Glimmer, an open agentic model for local use on individual Macs and PCs.
Especially with lauded Chinese startup DeepSeek raising prices on open models, Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is landing in an industry environment that is more amenable to open models than it perhaps ever has been. Nvidia is framing the model's customizability as a security and privacy perk rather than the risk it's been framed as thus far.
What it does: Muse Code (powered by the new Spark 1.2) is Meta's first coding agent, finally joining the likes of OpenAI Codex and Claude Code. Based on benchmarks Meta shared, it still lags behind Claude Code and Codex, but occupies the mid-tier of performance. At $1.25 per million input tokens, Muse Spark 1.2 is priced at a fraction of Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 (another strong coding model), which is $5 per million input tokens.
Also: Claude's Record-a-Skill cut my research from hours to 30 minutes - but the magic has limits