To be fair their Nemotron models are pretty good. The Parakeet speech-to-text model is also pretty good. That being said these pale in comparison to the frontier labs. They should've invested more into it, but I understand that they don't want to piss off their biggest competitors.

* they don't want to piss off their biggest customers.

:D

A friend of mine works on Nemotron. He stated quite plainly that they intentionally don't push the boundaries for the reason you state. It's similar to when companies create reference designs that show off the features of their real product, like Google and their Pixel phones

That's what I thought as well. One step behind by design.

What would investing in the models give them ? They already are selling chips at massive markup.

Investing in tooling so more people get on their stuff is direct return, but having yet another AI model is of little value aside from being a test bed for their AI tooling

Their gameplan has never seemed to be that they want to be an AI company.

Since the 2000s, they have been investing in tools designed to make their GPUs better for scientific work, and have been developing GPUs for those workloads.

what's asi

artificial super intelligence ... it's AI that's (vastly?) better at everything some human could do, I think.

Jensen said AGI is here when Astra was released...

https://fortune.com/2026/09/09/markets-agi-nvidia-singularit...

I wouldn't disagree with that. Astra was the first model that is actually really smart, doesn't constantly hallucinate, writes high quality code etc.

If it isn't AGI, it's at least something that shows that "AGI" is not a useful label. You wouldn't argue that we don't have Artificial General Flying because planes can't flap their wings.

A plane or a drone can do any aerial movement a bird can (in a shorter, less energy efficient manner). Can Astra do a software dev job alone without supervision? Let alone any other job.

> A plane or a drone can do any aerial movement a bird can

Have you ever seen a bird? Lol

In any case that's kind of my point. The existence of small niches that bird are good at that planes can't do doesn't mean that we can't fly.

The existence of small niches like writing prompts and counting letters in strawberry that AI doesn't do doesn't mean that our jobs are safe.

People think "we don't have AGI yet because AI still can't do X, so we're safe from Y" without realising that Y doesn't really require X.

>> Astra was the first model that is actually really smart, doesn't constantly hallucinate, writes high quality code etc.

Nope, that was Fable.

Actually that was every model that was released so far, and only in hindsight people noted that it actually was not.