GPT-OSS-120B vs Llama 3.1 Nemotron Nano 8B

GPT-OSS-120B

OpenAI

GPT-OSS-120B, released by OpenAI in August 2025, is an open-weight large language model with 120 billion parameters distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. It represents OpenAI's entry into the open-source model space, enabling developers to self-host and fine-tune a GPT-5-generation-class model. GPT-OSS-120B targets research applications, on-premises deployments, and custom fine-tuning workflows requiring a large open-weight base model.

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.