NVIDIA: Nemotron Nano 12B 2 VL (free)
NVIDIA's Nemotron Nano 12B 2 VL (free) offers multimodal vision and video input at no cost, which is appealing for experimentation, but without benchmark data a conservative score applies — businesses should test it directly for visual understanding tasks.
Assessment date: March 12, 2026
Our methodology takes into account a range of factors including pricing, functionality, capabilities, benchmark performance, and real-world applicability. Rankings are reviewed and updated regularly as new models are released. Issues with our rankings? Contact us
NVIDIA Nemotron Nano 2 VL is a 12-billion-parameter open multimodal reasoning model designed for video understanding and document intelligence. It introduces a hybrid Transformer-Mamba architecture, combining transformer-level accuracy with Mamba’s memory-efficient sequence modeling for significantly higher throughput and lower latency. The model supports inputs of text and multi-image documents, producing natural-language outputs. It is trained on high-quality NVIDIA-curated synthetic datasets optimized for optical-character recognition, chart reasoning, and multimodal comprehension. Nemotron Nano 2 VL achieves leading results on OCRBench v2 and scores ≈ 74 average across MMMU, MathVista, AI2D, OCRBench, OCR-Reasoning, ChartQA, DocVQA, and Video-MME—surpassing prior open VL baselines. With Efficient Video Sampling (EVS), it handles long-form videos while reducing inference cost. Open-weights, training data, and fine-tuning recipes are released under a permissive NVIDIA open license, with deployment supported across NeMo, NIM, and major inference runtimes.
Capabilities
Architecture
| Modality | Text + Image + Video → Text |
| Tokenizer | Other |
| Parameters | 12B |
Model Information
Live Performance
Live endpoint metrics — refreshed every 30 minutes.
External Resources
Data sourced from OpenRouter API, Artificial Analysis and Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard. Scores are editorially curated by our team.
Last updated: March 13, 2026 7:52 pm