NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is an open mixture-of-experts model from NVIDIA, with 3B active parameters out of 30B total. It is suited for high-throughput agentic workloads and specialized tasks that...
Model details →NVIDIA: Nemotron 3.5 Lightning vs OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini
OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini wins on 3 of 6 axes — pricing and capability skew in its favour for most workloads.
GPT-5 Mini is a compact version of GPT-5, designed to handle lighter-weight reasoning tasks. It provides the same instruction-following and safety-tuning benefits as GPT-5, but with reduced latency and cost....
Model details →Side-by-side comparison
| Capability | NVIDIA: Nemotron 3.5 Lightning | OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Context window Maximum number of input tokens the model can attend to in a single request. | 262K | 400K | 🏆 OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini |
| Input price (per 1M) Cost per million input tokens billed by the provider. | $0.10 | $0.25 | 🏆 NVIDIA: Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
| Output price (per 1M) Cost per million output tokens billed by the provider. | $0.25 | $2.00 | 🏆 NVIDIA: Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
| Tool / function calling First-class support for emitting structured tool calls. | — | Yes | 🏆 OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini |
| Vision input Accepts image inputs alongside text. | — | Yes | 🏆 OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini |
| Reasoning mode Internal chain-of-thought / extended-thinking support. | Yes | Yes | Tie |
Frequently asked questions
Is NVIDIA: Nemotron 3.5 Lightning better than OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini?
OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini wins on 3 of 6 axes — pricing and capability skew in its favour for most workloads.
What's the price difference between NVIDIA: Nemotron 3.5 Lightning and OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini?
Input: $0.10 vs $0.25 per 1M tokens. Output: $0.25 vs $2.00 per 1M tokens.
What context windows do NVIDIA: Nemotron 3.5 Lightning and OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini support?
NVIDIA: Nemotron 3.5 Lightning supports up to 262K tokens. OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini supports up to 400K tokens.
Do both NVIDIA: Nemotron 3.5 Lightning and OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini support tool calling?
NVIDIA: Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: not advertised. OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini: yes.