Llama 3.1 Nemotron Nano 8B vs o4 mini

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.

o4 mini

OpenAI

OpenAI o4 mini, released by OpenAI in April 2025, is a compact reasoning model from the o4 family that combines multimodal understanding with efficient chain-of-thought processing. It features a 200K token context window and native image understanding, with strong performance on mathematics and coding benchmarks relative to its inference cost. o4 mini targets cost-sensitive applications requiring both visual reasoning and mathematical accuracy.