DeepSeek-R1 vs Llama 3.1 Nemotron Nano 8B

DeepSeek-R1

DeepSeek

DeepSeek-R1, released by DeepSeek on January 20, 2025, is a large reasoning model with 671 billion total parameters (37 billion active in its MoE architecture) designed for extended chain-of-thought reasoning. It features a 128K token context window and demonstrated strong performance on mathematics, coding, and scientific reasoning benchmarks at its release. DeepSeek-R1 targets complex analytical tasks, competitive programming, and applications requiring deep deliberative reasoning under an open MIT license.

Llama 3.1 Nemotron Nano 8B

NVIDIA

Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Nano-8B-v1 is an 8-billion-parameter model from NVIDIA, developed as a fine-tuned variant of Meta's Llama 3.1 8B using NVIDIA's Nemotron post-training methodology, which applies reinforcement learning and process reward modeling to enhance instruction-following and reasoning capability over the base model. The Nano designation marks it as the entry-level member of the Nemotron family, optimized for efficient inference on a single GPU while delivering meaningfully improved performance on instruction alignment and agentic tasks compared to standard Llama 3.1. Released open-weight on HuggingFace, it is designed for deployment in NVIDIA-accelerated environments and supports NVIDIA NIM for enterprise inference.