# Grok 3 vs Nemotron 3.5 Lightning

> Grok 3 and Nemotron 3.5 Lightning score almost the same on the Noometry Index (39.6 vs 39.3), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/grok-3-vs-nemotron-3-5-lightning
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 18

## Summary

- They share 18 benchmarks with published results for both. Grok 3 scores higher in 6 categories and Nemotron 3.5 Lightning in 2 categories; 8 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in reasoning, where Nemotron 3.5 Lightning leads 25.7 to 13.8.
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Grok 3 | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | xAI | NVIDIA |
| Noometry Index | 39.6 | 39.3 |
| Rank | 150 | 156 |
| Context | — | 262K |
| Input $/M | — | $0.06 |
| Output $/M | — | $0.16 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- Grok 3: 41.5 (#113)
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 39.6 (#143)

| Benchmark | Grok 3 | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1432 | 1370 |
| Aider Polyglot | 53.3% | — |
| WeirdML | 37.2% | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Grok 3: 30.2 (#69)
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: —

| Benchmark | Grok 3 | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| BALROG | 29.5% | — |

## Reasoning

- Grok 3: 13.8 (#322)
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 25.7 (#128)

| Benchmark | Grok 3 | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1433 | 1335 |
| ARC-AGI-2 | 0% | — |
| SimpleBench | 36.1% | — |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 61.3% | — |
| ARC-AGI-1 | 5.5% | — |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 138.34 | — |

## Math

- Grok 3: 36.2 (#122)
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 34.7 (#156)

| Benchmark | Grok 3 | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Math | 1390 | 1355 |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 55.6% | — |
| Omni-MATH | 46.4% | — |
| MATH Level 5 | 88.7% | — |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | 3.8% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | 0% | — |

## Knowledge

- Grok 3: 46.0 (#76)
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 36.9 (#154)

| Benchmark | Grok 3 | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Expert | 1420 | 1354 |
| GPQA Diamond | 75.8% | — |
| MMLU-Pro | 78.8% | — |
| Confabulations | 14.2% | — |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 5.8% | — |
| GPQA (HELM) | 65% | — |

## Multilingual

- Grok 3: 52.5 (#81)
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 44.0 (#175)

| Benchmark | Grok 3 | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1411 | 1292 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1448 | 1356 |
| LMArena French | 1460 | 1369 |
| LMArena German | 1431 | 1280 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1389 | 1213 |
| LMArena Korean | 1374 | 1233 |
| LMArena Russian | 1416 | 1257 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1417 | 1321 |

## Instruction Following

- Grok 3: 75.2 (#69)
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 69.8 (#166)

| Benchmark | Grok 3 | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1409 | 1317 |
| IFEval | 88.4% | — |

## Long Context

- Grok 3: 38.7 (#187)
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 39.9 (#160)

| Benchmark | Grok 3 | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1439 | 1312 |
| Fiction.LiveBench | 58.3% | — |

## Writing & Preference

- Grok 3: 56.0 (#136)
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 48.5 (#198)

| Benchmark | Grok 3 | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1426 | 1324 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1414 | 1254 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 1186 | 1280 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1424 | 1327 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | 76.4% | — |
| WildBench | 84.9% | — |

## FAQ

### Is Grok 3 better than Nemotron 3.5 Lightning?

Grok 3 and Nemotron 3.5 Lightning score almost the same on the Noometry Index (39.6 vs 39.3), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

### Is Grok 3 or Nemotron 3.5 Lightning better for coding?

Grok 3 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 41.5 versus 39.6 in the Noometry coding category.

### How many benchmarks do Grok 3 and Nemotron 3.5 Lightning share?

18 benchmarks have published results for both models. Grok 3 has 40 scored results on Noometry and Nemotron 3.5 Lightning has 18.