Nemotron vs. Vicuna

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

Overview

Released alongside Koala, Vicuna is one of many descendants of the Meta LLaMA model trained on dialogue data collected from the ShareGPT website. According to the authors, Vicuna achieves more than 90% of ChatGPT's quality in user preference tests, while vastly outperforming Alpaca. As of May 2023, Vicuna seems to be the heir apparent of the instruct-finetuned LLaMA model family, though it is also restricted from commercial use.

Initial release: 2023-03-30

Reference

https://vicuna.lmsys.org/

Further Reading

• https://lmsys.org/blog/2023-03-30-vicuna/