Shopify shares how Sidekick uses a post-trained open-source model as the GraphQL sub-agent

On October 21, 2026, the Shopify engineering team, in a talk at NVIDIA GTC Berlin 2026, shared the model division-of-labor plan for its e-commerce assistant Sidekick: a frontier model handles conversation planning, while a self-deployed open-source model handles the GraphQL sub-agent. The team chose the MoE model Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, with 30 billion total parameters and 3 billion parameters activated per token; after 6 rounds of post-training and 61,000 repair samples, the review score rose from 37.7 out of the box to 74.5, slightly above the frontier model's 73. On GraphQL tasks, the median response was 0.87 seconds, versus 6.50 seconds for the frontier model API, at roughly 90% lower cost. Currently this talk is a single-source report, with no follow-up developments yet.

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1. Oct 21· 1 reports

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   Source:Shao Meng