Nvidia releases a new small, open model Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2 with toggle on/off reasoning

Small models are having a moment. On the heels of the release of a new AI vision model small enough to fit on a smartwatch from MIT spinoff Liquid AI, and a model small enough to run on a smartphone from Google, Nvidia is joining the party today with a new small language model (SLM) of its own, Nemotron-Nano-9B-V2, which attained the highest performance in its class on selected benchmarks and comes with the ability for users to toggle on and off AI “reasoning,” that is, self-checking before outputting an answer.

While the 9 billion parameters are larger than some of the multimillion parameter small models VentureBeat has covered recently, Nvidia notes it is a meaningful reduction from its original size of 12 billion parameters and is designed to fit on a single Nvidia A10 GPU.

As Oleksii Kuchiaev, Nvidia Director of AI Model Post-Training, said on X in response ...