DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale vs Llama-3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B

DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale

DeepSeek

DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale is a high-compute variant of DeepSeek-V3.2 with 685 billion total parameters, made available for a limited period in December 2025. It was released without tool-calling support but demonstrated exceptional reasoning performance, achieving gold-medal results in the 2025 IMO and IOI competitions. DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale targets research and benchmarking use cases requiring maximum reasoning capability under an MIT license.

Llama-3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B

NVIDIA

Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Ultra-253B-v1 is a 253-billion-parameter model from NVIDIA, derived from Meta's Llama 3.1 405B using neural architecture search (NAS) compression combined with NVIDIA's Nemotron post-training pipeline, which recovers and exceeds the base model's capability after structural compression. Released in April 2025, it supports toggling between a standard instruction mode and an extended reasoning mode via system prompt, allowing the same model to handle both rapid responses and deliberate chain-of-thought tasks. It is the flagship of the Nemotron family, available open-weight on HuggingFace and through NVIDIA NIM for enterprise inference.