There was an obvious problem in the original release, they re issued it after like a week with the reasoning looping supposedly fixed.

No it doesn't follow instructions and is substantially slower than ds4.

Yeah I think it got bad press because the chat templates (or something?) were messed up on first release, but I've been using a quant of it and it's a powerhouse, better than qwen 3.6 27b for local on a 3090, which is saying a lot.

I think glancing at a random snapshot from today misses all the context. Nemotron 3 is far more significant than you're giving it credit for.

At this point, Nemotron 3 is really an 8 month old model series. That's when Nemotron 3 Nano was released, and the Nemotron 3 Super/Ultra models this year are obviously based on that recipe, mostly just bigger with a few tweaks here and there. Against today's models, no, not that interesting. Each of the Nemotron 3 models were briefly competitive when they launched, but never exceptional, and less competitive with each scale up. The fact that it took so long for Nemotron 3 Ultra to launch really hampered its competitiveness.

The Nemotron 3 series is extremely open about training recipes and training data, far more open than most open weight models, and that is valuable.

Before Nemotron 3, Nvidia had never released a single LLM that I would consider interesting at all, so Nemotron 3 was a big step up. The closest thing was Mistral NeMo, but a significant part of the credit there goes to the Mistral team, not Nvidia.

Given how much Nemotron 3 improved, I'm curious to see if Nemotron 4 will take them to a leading edge level instead of just briefly competitive.

(Nvidia released a Nemotron 3 and a Nemotron 4 like 3 years ago... this year's Nemotron 3 is entirely unrelated. Nvidia's naming schemes leave a little bit to be desired.)

He said something to the effect of "I love open source and open models and we'll do open models when it makes sense and closed models when it makes sense" in a recent Q&A.