Compare / Nemotron 3.5 Lightning vs OLMo 3.1 32B Think

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning vs OLMo 3.1 32B Think

Updated November 2026

Verdict

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning scores higher on the Small LM Index: 63.6 vs 57.0, although their likely ranges overlap, so the lead is not certain. On the 1 benchmark both labs report, Nemotron 3.5 Lightning wins 1 and OLMo 3.1 32B Think wins 0. Both need about 22.4 GB of memory at 4-bit quantization. Only Nemotron 3.5 Lightning has a hosted API on OpenRouter ($0.049 per million tokens); the other has to be self-hosted.

Pick Nemotron 3.5 Lightning if…

you want the strongest model overall
you want a hosted API rather than running it yourself
you work with long documents

Pick OLMo 3.1 32B Think if…

you need a permissive license (Apache-2.0)

Specifications

	Nemotron 3.5 Lightning	OLMo 3.1 32B Think
Small LM Index	63.6 (likely 55–71)	57.0 (likely 53–61)
Lab	NVIDIA · United States	Ai2 (OLMo) · United States
Released	2026-08-11	2025-12-10
Parameters	31.6B (3.6B active, MoE)	32.2B (dense)
Memory at 4-bit	~22.4 GB	~22 GB
Context window	1M tokens	64K tokens
Input	text	text
Reasoning	Always thinks	Always thinks
License	OpenMDW-1.1	Apache-2.0
API price / 1M tokens	$0.049 ($0.025 in, $0.12 out)	Self-host only
Hugging Face downloads (30 days)	—	6.9K

Benchmarks

Higher is better. Bold marks the winner where both labs report a score. ≈ marks the index model's estimate for a score that wasn't reported, ✓ an independent measurement and * a score measured by another lab.

Benchmark	Nemotron 3.5 Lightning	OLMo 3.1 32B Think
MMLU-Pro Knowledge	81.9	≈ 77
GPQA Diamond Knowledge	75.4	57.5
AIME Math	≈ 88	78.1
LiveCodeBench Coding	≈ 73	83.3
SWE-bench Verified Coding	51.6	≈ 41
IFBench Instruction following	—	68.1
MMLU Knowledge	—	86.4
IFEval Instruction following	—	93.8

Scores are mostly reported by each lab with its own settings, so small gaps are noise. See the methodology. Open in the interactive comparison to add more models.

Questions

Which is better, Nemotron 3.5 Lightning or OLMo 3.1 32B Think?

Which is cheaper to run?

Only Nemotron 3.5 Lightning has a hosted API on OpenRouter ($0.049 per million tokens); the other has to be self-hosted. Both need about 22.4 GB of memory at 4-bit quantization.

Which has the longer context window?

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning has the longer context window: 1M tokens against 64K.

Can I use Nemotron 3.5 Lightning and OLMo 3.1 32B Think commercially?

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is released under OpenMDW-1.1 and OLMo 3.1 32B Think under Apache-2.0. Apache 2.0 and MIT allow commercial use; other licenses can add conditions, so read the license before shipping a product.