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.

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

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

:D