Dense vs. MoE Models: Active Parameters, Throughput, and When to Choose Each

How can a 30B-parameter model activate only 3B parameters per token, and still use the capacity of the larger model? Nemotron 3.5 Lightning illustrates the...

How can a 30B-parameter model activate only 3B parameters per token, and still use the capacity of the larger model? Nemotron 3.5 Lightning illustrates the answer: It uses a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture that selects only a subset of its parameters for each token. There are two dominant model architectures: Dense model and MoE. How a model organizes its parameters matters as much as…