Llama 3.1 Nemotron Nano 8B vs Qwen3-235B-A22B

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.

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen3-235B-A22B, released by Alibaba's Qwen team on April 28, 2025, is a Mixture-of-Experts large language model with 235 billion total parameters and 22 billion active parameters per inference. It features a 256K token context window, hybrid thinking capabilities (both reasoning and direct generation modes), and was trained on 36 trillion tokens across 119 languages. Qwen3-235B targets complex reasoning, multilingual tasks, and open-source deployments under the Apache 2.0 license.