GPT-4.1 nano vs Nova 2 Lite

GPT-4.1 nano

OpenAI

GPT-4.1 nano is OpenAI's smallest member of the GPT-4.1 family, released in April 2025 alongside GPT-4.1 and GPT-4.1 mini as the latency-optimized, cost-minimized option for high-throughput applications. Positioned below GPT-4.1 mini in both size and cost, it was designed for use cases where speed and affordability dominate over raw capability — including tool calling, intent classification, short-form instruction following, and retrieval-augmented lookup tasks. Unlike its larger siblings, it supports fine-tuning, making it a practical candidate for task-specific customization at scale without incurring the cost of fine-tuning larger models.

Nova 2 Lite

Amazon

Amazon Nova 2 Lite, released by Amazon Web Services on December 2, 2025, is a fast, cost-efficient reasoning model available on Amazon Bedrock with a 1M token context window enabling extended document, video, and image analysis. It features three extended thinking intensity levels, built-in code interpreter, web grounding tools, and native support for text, image, video, and document input. Nova 2 Lite targets cost-sensitive agentic applications, document analysis pipelines, and real-time workloads requiring multimodal reasoning.