NVIDIA AI

Introducing Samaya Sterling, our new model post-trained for challenging financial research that outperforms the frontier! Sterling started off as a two person research effort to see if we could increase efficiency in agentic orchestration. To our surprise we were able to post-train a much smaller model (Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, a 30B mixture-of-experts model with 3B active parameters) to greater accuracy (58.9% vs 55.9% on FrontierFinance) and 11x lower cost ($0.61 vs $6.89) than Claude Fable 5.1, the best performing frontier model. We did this via a four-stage training process, two stages of SFT where the model first learns to research with our financial tools and how to construct a good agentic research strategy. The second two stages are RL, with an offline GRPO stage where the model further hones its research strategy from eight teachers that provide diverse approaches, and an online GRPO stage where the model can make end to end attempts and learn from its mistakes. We see substantial gains from the co-adaptation of the model and harness through post-training, both through the model learning to effectively use the high-quality financial tools, and better compaction approaches that let even a small model execute on longer and deeper research. We are exploring multiple follow-up directions, from multi-agent research swarms using this small model, to training firm-specific models to encode unique judgement, to training a larger model, where early results show even greater gains from the training process. The full research is linked below!