Grok 3 mini vs Llama 3.1 Nemotron Nano 8B

Grok 3 mini

xAI

Grok 3 mini, released by xAI alongside Grok 3 in February 2025, is a compact reasoning model from the Grok 3 family featuring RL-enhanced Think mode for extended chain-of-thought processing. It features a 131K token context window and targets STEM tasks, mathematics, and coding applications where cost-efficient reasoning with configurable depth is required.

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.