How NVIDIA’s Orchestrator-8B Outperforms GPT-5 While Costing 70% Less

NVIDIA Orchestrator-8B: How an 8B Model Beats GPT-5 on the Hardest Exam While Costing 70% Less Core question this post answers: How can an 8-billion-parameter model score 37.1% on Humanity’s Last Exam (HLE) — higher than GPT-5’s 35.1% — while being 2.5× faster and costing only ~30% as much? The answer is a complete paradigm shift: stop trying to solve everything inside one giant model. Instead, train a small “conductor” that intelligently delegates subtasks to a heterogeneous orchestra of tools and expert models. That conductor is Orchestrator-8B. This post is a full technical deep-dive for engineers, researchers, and AI builders …