New Models AI Minute Newsroom 2026-08-13

Nvidia is training a trillion-parameter model it plans to give away — and it is already behind on size

The Information reported on 11 August, citing employees working on the project, that the largest model in Nvidia's next open family, Nemotron 4, will carry at least a trillion parameters — roughly twice the 550 billion of Nemotron 3 Ultra. Training is not finished and there is no announced release date, though staff said it could be ready as early as late autumn. Nvidia is one of the few large American companies still publishing open weights, and the stated aim is to give enterprises a Western model they can download and run on their own hardware rather than renting through an API. The number is not a record: Alibaba published Qwen3.8-Max at 2.4 trillion parameters this week, and Moonshot's Kimi K3 arrived at 2.8 trillion in July. Nvidia has not commented publicly on the plan.

Why it mattersNvidia sells the shovels, so a free flagship model is not a product line for it — it is demand generation for the hardware everyone needs to run one. That makes it the rare open-weights release with a business model behind it that does not depend on the model earning anything. The context is more interesting than the parameter count: the open-weight leaderboard is now Chinese, and Western companies that want to self-host have been choosing Chinese weights largely for lack of an alternative. Treat the timing loosely — this is an unfinished training run reported by employees, and schedules of this kind slip routinely.

✓ Verified · 3 sources

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Nvidia is training a trillion-parameter model it plans to give away — and it is already behind on size

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