NVIDIA Open-Sources Audex: A 30B Audio-Text LLM Built on Nemotron

NVIDIA has released Audex (Nemotron-Labs-Audex-30B-A3B), a unified audio-text large language model that integrates audio understanding directly into a text-capable backbone without degrading its language reasoning performance. The model is a 30B parameter mixture-of-experts architecture with only 3B active parameters per forward pass, making inference more practical than the parameter count suggests. A key design goal was preserving the text intelligence of the underlying Nemotron model while adding audio modality — a common failure mode in multimodal fine-tuning that NVIDIA explicitly claims to have addressed. For developers building voice assistants, transcription pipelines, or audio-grounded reasoning applications, Audex offers a production-weight open model worth benchmarking. Its release on Hugging Face makes it immediately accessible for experimentation.