Comprehensive side-by-side LLM comparison
Llama 3.1 Nemotron Nano 8B leads with 15.0% higher average benchmark score. Overall, Llama 3.1 Nemotron Nano 8B is the stronger choice for coding tasks.
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.
Mistral AI
Mistral Small 3 is a 24-billion-parameter open-weight language model from Mistral AI, released in January 2025 as an update to the Mistral Small line with targeted improvements to instruction-following, multilingual reasoning, and structured output quality. Released under Apache 2.0, it was designed for deployment on a single high-VRAM GPU, continuing Mistral's focus on practical efficiency over maximum scale. The model became a widely-used option for teams building internal tooling, customer-facing applications, and local inference pipelines that needed strong general capability without the operational overhead of larger models.
24 days newer

Llama 3.1 Nemotron Nano 8B
NVIDIA
2025-01-06

Mistral Small 3 24B
Mistral AI
2025-01-30
Average performance across 1 common benchmarks
Llama 3.1 Nemotron Nano 8B
Mistral Small 3 24B
Performance comparison across key benchmark categories
Llama 3.1 Nemotron Nano 8B
Mistral Small 3 24B
Available providers and their performance metrics
Llama 3.1 Nemotron Nano 8B
Mistral Small 3 24B
Llama 3.1 Nemotron Nano 8B
Mistral Small 3 24B