NVIDIA open-sources Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB, a Gemma 4 E4B-based small model for local assistants, characters and robots with tool use
On 2026-10-23 (15:41 UTC) the official @NVIDIAAI account announced Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB, a small open model for local assistants, interactive characters and robots that can hold a conversation and use tools. The official Hugging Face model card says it is post-trained from Gemma-4-E4B-it, has 8B total parameters (4B effective), ships in Q4_K_M quantization, supports up to 64K input and 64K output tokens, and has a switchable thinking mode, plus a DFlash speculative-decoding drafter and a BF16 version. Weights, data and recipes are open under the OpenMDW-1.1 license, with commercial use allowed. On the model card the 4GB build scores 55.60 on MultiChallenge (Gemma4 E4B-it at the same quantization 39.36, Qwen3.5 4B 52.23), but trails Qwen3.5 4B on Tau2-Bench (52.32) and BFCL-v3 (67.31).
Key Takeaways
- NVIDIA officially released Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB for local assistants, interactive characters and robots
- Post-trained from Gemma-4-E4B-it: 8B total parameters (4B effective), Q4_K_M quantization, 64K context, switchable thinking mode
- Open weights, data and recipes under the OpenMDW-1.1 license with commercial use allowed, plus a DFlash speculative-decoding drafter
- Model card results: 55.60 on MultiChallenge leads its size class, but it trails Qwen3.5 4B on Tau2-Bench and BFCL-v3
