What new open-source agentic AI model was released by Nvidia on December 17, 2025?

Nvidia unveiled a significant advancement in artificial intelligence with the release of its Nemotron 3 family of open-source agentic AI models on December 15, 2025. This highly anticipated launch provided developers with a powerful new toolkit for building sophisticated AI systems. The Nemotron 3 models are specifically designed to support agentic AI applications, which are characterized by their ability to operate autonomously, make decisions, and perform complex tasks independently across various contexts and with multiple AI agents.

The Nemotron 3 family introduces a breakthrough hybrid mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture. This innovative design helps to optimize computational efficiency and memory usage while still delivering exceptional intelligence. The initial release included Nemotron 3 Nano, a smaller, 30-billion-parameter model optimized for efficient and targeted tasks. Nvidia also announced larger models, Nemotron 3 Super and Ultra, which are expected in the first half of 2026 and are designed for more complex multi-agent applications and advanced reasoning.

Beyond just the models, Nvidia further enriched the open-source AI ecosystem by releasing three trillion tokens of new pretraining, post-training, and reinforcement learning data alongside Nemotron 3. They also provided open-source libraries such as NeMo Gym and NeMo RL, offering developers comprehensive training environments and evaluation frameworks. This commitment to open innovation allows for greater transparency and control in how these models are trained and adapted, fostering a collaborative environment for AI development.

Agentic AI represents a crucial evolution in the field, moving beyond traditional AI models that primarily respond to direct commands. Unlike purely generative AI that focuses on content creation, agentic AI leverages large language models as a "brain" to set goals, plan, execute tasks, and even use external tools to achieve those goals with minimal human oversight. This continuous cycle of perception, reasoning, planning, action, and reflection enables agentic AI systems to learn and improve over time, making Nemotron 3 a significant contribution to the development of more autonomous and intelligent AI applications across diverse industries.