Devstral-2-123B vs Llama-3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B

Devstral-2-123B

Mistral AI

Devstral 2, released by Mistral AI on December 9, 2025, is a 123 billion parameter dense transformer model specifically designed for software engineering tasks. It features a 256K token context window and achieved 72.2% on SWE-bench Verified at release, making it a competitive open-weight option for automated coding and agentic development. Devstral 2 targets code generation, multi-file software engineering, and agentic development workflows under a modified 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.