According to CNBC, Nvidia has released Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, a lightweight open-source AI model that the company says can run on a single graphics processing unit on a PC. Nvidia said the model is free for companies to download, use and modify without permission or payment, and that it is designed for agents, or AI programs that can run autonomously in the background. The chipmaker also introduced NeMo Switchyard software to help determine the cheapest and most appropriate AI model for a given task. Nvidia representatives said the company used distillation to give Nemotron 3.5 Lightning capabilities similar to its larger Nemotron models. The release follows chief executive Jensen Huang's recent push to support open models and his statement that open-source AI should be good for hardware and chips.