Kimi K2 vs Llama 3.1 Nemotron Nano 8B

Moonshot AI

Kimi K2, released by Moonshot AI on July 11, 2025, is an open-weight Mixture-of-Experts large language model with 1 trillion total parameters and 32 billion active parameters per inference. It features a 256K token context window (expanded from 128K in an September 2025 update) and demonstrated strong performance on agentic coding benchmarks. Kimi K2 targets software engineering agents, tool-use workflows, and open-source deployments under a modified MIT license.

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.