List of the Top 4 Small Language Models for NVIDIA DRIVE in 2026

We are excited to unveil Mistral NeMo, our latest and most sophisticated small model, boasting an impressive 12 billion parameters and a vast context length of 128,000 tokens, all available under the Apache 2.0 license. In collaboration with NVIDIA, Mistral NeMo stands out in its category for its exceptional reasoning capabilities, extensive world knowledge, and coding skills. Its architecture adheres to established industry standards, ensuring it is user-friendly and serves as a smooth transition for those currently using Mistral 7B. To encourage adoption by researchers and businesses alike, we are providing both pre-trained base models and instruction-tuned checkpoints, all under the Apache license. A remarkable feature of Mistral NeMo is its quantization awareness, which enables FP8 inference while maintaining high performance levels. Additionally, the model is well-suited for a range of global applications, showcasing its ability in function calling and offering a significant context window. When benchmarked against Mistral 7B, Mistral NeMo demonstrates a marked improvement in comprehending and executing intricate instructions, highlighting its advanced reasoning abilities and capacity to handle complex multi-turn dialogues. Furthermore, its design not only enhances its performance but also positions it as a formidable option for multi-lingual tasks, ensuring it meets the diverse needs of various use cases while paving the way for future innovations.

The Gemma family is composed of advanced and lightweight models that are built upon the same groundbreaking research and technology as the Gemini line. These state-of-the-art models come with powerful security features that foster responsible and trustworthy AI usage, a result of meticulously selected data sets and comprehensive refinements. Remarkably, the Gemma models perform exceptionally well in their varied sizes—2B, 7B, 9B, and 27B—frequently surpassing the capabilities of some larger open models. With the launch of Keras 3.0, users benefit from seamless integration with JAX, TensorFlow, and PyTorch, allowing for adaptable framework choices tailored to specific tasks. Optimized for peak performance and exceptional efficiency, Gemma 2 in particular is designed for swift inference on a wide range of hardware platforms. Moreover, the Gemma family encompasses a variety of models tailored to meet different use cases, ensuring effective adaptation to user needs. These lightweight language models are equipped with a decoder and have undergone training on a broad spectrum of textual data, programming code, and mathematical concepts, which significantly boosts their versatility and utility across numerous applications. This diverse approach not only enhances their performance but also positions them as a valuable resource for developers and researchers alike.

Jamba has emerged as the leading long context model, specifically crafted for builders and tailored to meet enterprise requirements. It outperforms other prominent models of similar scale with its exceptional latency and features a groundbreaking 256k context window, the largest available. Utilizing the innovative Mamba-Transformer MoE architecture, Jamba prioritizes cost efficiency and operational effectiveness. Among its out-of-the-box features are function calls, JSON mode output, document objects, and citation mode, all aimed at improving the overall user experience. The Jamba 1.5 models excel in performance across their expansive context window and consistently achieve top-tier scores on various quality assessment metrics. Enterprises can take advantage of secure deployment options customized to their specific needs, which facilitates seamless integration with existing systems. Furthermore, Jamba is readily accessible via our robust SaaS platform, and deployment options also include collaboration with strategic partners, providing users with added flexibility. For organizations that require specialized solutions, we offer dedicated management and ongoing pre-training services, ensuring that each client can make the most of Jamba’s capabilities. This level of adaptability and support positions Jamba as a premier choice for enterprises in search of innovative and effective solutions for their needs. Additionally, Jamba's commitment to continuous improvement ensures that it remains at the forefront of technological advancements, further solidifying its reputation as a trusted partner for businesses.

The Phi-4-mini-flash-reasoning model, boasting 3.8 billion parameters, is a key part of Microsoft's Phi series, tailored for environments with limited processing capabilities such as edge and mobile platforms. Its state-of-the-art SambaY hybrid decoder architecture combines Gated Memory Units (GMUs) with Mamba state-space and sliding-window attention layers, resulting in performance improvements that are up to ten times faster and decreasing latency by two to three times compared to previous iterations, while still excelling in complex reasoning tasks. Designed to support a context length of 64K tokens and fine-tuned on high-quality synthetic datasets, this model is particularly effective for long-context retrieval and real-time inference, making it efficient enough to run on a single GPU. Accessible via platforms like Azure AI Foundry, NVIDIA API Catalog, and Hugging Face, Phi-4-mini-flash-reasoning presents developers with the tools to build applications that are both rapid and highly scalable, capable of performing intensive logical processing. This extensive availability encourages a diverse group of developers to utilize its advanced features, paving the way for creative and innovative application development in various fields.