Llama-3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B vs Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B

Llama-3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B

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-VL-235B-A22B, released by Alibaba's Qwen team in September 2025, is a natively multimodal Mixture-of-Experts large language model with 235 billion total parameters and 22 billion active parameters. It features a 256K token context window (with extrapolation to 1M tokens), native support for text, image, and video input, and joint visual-textual reasoning capabilities. Qwen3-VL-235B targets complex visual reasoning, video understanding, and multimodal agentic tasks under the Apache 2.0 license.