Guanaco vs. Nemotron

Overview

Guanaco is an LLM based off the QLoRA 4-bit finetuning method developed by Tim Dettmers et. al. in the UW NLP group. Guanaco achieves 99% ChatGPT performance on the Vicuna benchmark.

Guanaco is an LLM that uses a finetuning method called LoRA that was developed by Tim Dettmers et. al. in the UW NLP group. With QLoRA, it becomes possible to finetune up to a 65B parameter model on a 48GB GPU without loss of performance relative to a 16-bit model. The Guanaco model family outperforms all previously released models on the Vicuna benchmark. However, given the models are based off of the LLaMA model family, commercial use is not permitted.

Initial release: 2023-05-23

Reference

https://github.com/artidoro/qlora

Further Reading

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14314
• https://twitter.com/Tim_Dettmers/status/1661379354507476994

Overview

Nemotron is NVIDIA's open model family for efficient reasoning, coding, long-context analysis, and agent orchestration. Nemotron 3 Ultra is the current flagship.

NVIDIA introduced the Nemotron 3 family in December 2025 with Nano, Super, and Ultra tiers. Nemotron 3 Ultra, released in June 2026, is a 550B-parameter hybrid Mamba-Transformer mixture-of-experts model with 55B active parameters and a one-million-token context window. It is optimized for long-running agent workflows, tool use, code, multilingual reasoning, and high-stakes retrieval. NVIDIA publishes the weights, training data, recipes, and fine-tuning workflows under the OpenMDW-1.1 license.

Initial release: 2025-12-15

Current generation: Nemotron 3 Ultra

Reference

https://build.nvidia.com/nvidia/nemotron-3-ultra-550b-a55b/modelcard

Further Reading

• https://research.nvidia.com/labs/nemotron/Nemotron-3/
• https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-nemotron-3-ultra-powers-faster-more-efficient-reasoning-for-long-running-agents/
• https://build.nvidia.com/nvidia/nemotron-3-ultra-550b-a55b/modelcard