Author: IBL News

IBL News | New York

NVIDIA released Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, a 120-billion-parameter open-source model that the company said can work across PDFs, charts, tables, images, and webpages while following instructions and using tools.

It’s a customizable multimodal system for specialized workflows, with a 120B-parameter mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture that activates 12B parameters per token, balancing model capacity with inference efficiency.

It comes with always-on agents designed for taking on longer, more complex enterprise workflows.

The model combines reasoning, instruction following, and tool use with text, image, document, and video understanding.

• Coding: Test and validate code, analyze errors, and recommend fixes.
• Web research: Search across websites, connect information, and verify answers.
• Document intelligence: Extract information from tables, charts, and page layouts to produce summaries and reports.
• Cybersecurity: Identify security vulnerabilities and triage threats to prioritize remediation.
• Video understanding: Extract information for search, content review, and incident analysis.

By combining these capabilities into a single model, teams can handle text and visual tasks without deploying separate text and vision-language models or passing task context between them.

For example, a single request can involve reading a document, checking information across sources, following company policy, and calling several tools.

Another example, before producing a useful answer, can be reviewing a credit agreement to extract figures from tables, interpret a chart, check a related webpage, and apply the company’s own rules.

On a single GPU, this model delivers up to 5x higher throughput for agentic tasks compared to other open models in its size category.

Developers can post-train Nemotron 3.5 Super VL with NVIDIA NeMo using their own data, tools, policies, and workflows.

This model was also optimized to run locally on NVIDIA DGX Spark.

Several NVIDIA partners supported customization and deployment of Nemotron 3.5 Super VL for domain-specific workflows.

• AfterQuery
• AgileRL
• AI21
• Alice
• Applied Compute
• Baseten
• Bespoke Labs
• Databricks
• distil labs
• Fastino Labs
• Fireworks AI
• Handshake
• Mercor
• Mindbeam
• ms-swift
• Multiverse Computing
• Prime Intellect
• Reasonable
• River AI
• Scale AI
• Thinking Machines Lab (Tinker)
• TNG
• Trajectory

IBL News | New York

High-profile AI startup Character.AI filed for bankruptcy last week, with the goal of reaching a global resolution of all legal claims it received, including lawsuits alleging the company’s chatbots pushed children to suicide and ​self-harm.

Character.AI also said it agreed to sell some assets to Walt Disney for $20 million.

US states had sued the company multiple times, with Kentucky alleging that its chatbots encouraged users to cut, starve, or ​kill themselves and Pennsylvania alleging its chatbots posed as doctors.

Character.AI reached preliminary settlements in five private lawsuits in January. ⁠However, recent court documents from those five cases indicated that the settlements had ​not yet been finalized or paid.

Two former Google employees founded Character.AI in 2021. In 2024, Google licensed Character.AI’s technology and rehired the founders.

The company has not been profitable, despite having ​roughly 12 million active users. ⁠It was operating at a loss of approximately $8 million to $9 million per month, according to court documents filed in the Wilmington, Delaware, bankruptcy court.

Character Technologies, its US-based owner, listed estimated assets and liabilities of between $50 million and $100 million, according to a court filing.

The platform will continue to operate during the bankruptcy, but may be shut down if it can’t find a buyer, the company said.