Comprehensive side-by-side LLM comparison
. Both models have their strengths depending on your specific coding needs.
NVIDIA
Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Ultra-253B-v1 is a 253-billion-parameter model from NVIDIA, derived from Meta's Llama 3.1 405B using neural architecture search (NAS) compression combined with NVIDIA's Nemotron post-training pipeline, which recovers and exceeds the base model's capability after structural compression. Released in April 2025, it supports toggling between a standard instruction mode and an extended reasoning mode via system prompt, allowing the same model to handle both rapid responses and deliberate chain-of-thought tasks. It is the flagship of the Nemotron family, available open-weight on HuggingFace and through NVIDIA NIM for enterprise inference.
Alibaba / Qwen
Qwen3-Max, released by Alibaba in September 2025 as an API preview, is a large language model exceeding one trillion parameters built for complex reasoning and long-context tasks. It features a 262K token context window, hybrid thinking modes that allow switching between direct generation and extended chain-of-thought, and is available as a proprietary cloud API via Alibaba Cloud and Qwen Chat. Qwen3-Max targets demanding reasoning, multilingual analysis, and applications requiring frontier-level performance from the Qwen3 generation.
5 months newer

Llama-3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B
NVIDIA
2025-04-07
Qwen3-Max
Alibaba / Qwen
2025-09-05
Context window and performance specifications
Available providers and their performance metrics
Llama-3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B
Qwen3-Max
OpenRouter
Llama-3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B
Qwen3-Max
Llama-3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B
Qwen3-Max