Compare the Top Foundation Models in the USA as of October 2026

What are Foundation Models in the USA?

Foundation models are large-scale artificial intelligence models trained on vast and diverse datasets that serve as the underlying technology for a wide range of AI applications. These models learn general-purpose capabilities such as language understanding, reasoning, image recognition, code generation, speech processing, and multimodal comprehension, allowing them to be adapted or fine-tuned for specific tasks across industries. Foundation models power applications including chatbots, AI agents, search, content generation, software development, scientific research, and business automation. Many are available through cloud APIs, open-source distributions, and enterprise AI platforms, supporting custom model development, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and domain-specific optimization. By providing reusable, general-purpose intelligence, foundation models enable organizations to accelerate AI development, reduce implementation costs, and build sophisticated AI-powered applications. Compare and read user reviews of the best Foundation Models in the USA currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.

  • 1
    Nemotron 3 Ultra
    Nemotron 3 Nano is a compact, open large language model in NVIDIA’s Nemotron 3 family, designed for efficient agentic reasoning, conversational AI, and coding tasks. It uses a hybrid Mixture-of-Experts Mamba-Transformer architecture that activates only a small subset of parameters per token, enabling low-latency inference while maintaining strong accuracy and reasoning performance. It has approximately 31.6 billion total parameters with around 3.2 billion active (3.6 billion including embeddings), allowing it to achieve higher accuracy than previous Nemotron 2 Nano while using less computation per forward pass. Nemotron 3 Nano supports long-context processing of up to one million tokens, enabling it to handle large documents, multi-step workflows, and extended reasoning chains in a single pass. It is designed for high-throughput, real-time execution, excelling in multi-turn conversations, tool calling, and agent-based workflows where tasks require planning, reasoning, and more.
  • 2
    CodeQwen

    CodeQwen

    Alibaba

    CodeQwen is the code version of Qwen, the large language model series developed by the Qwen team, Alibaba Cloud. It is a transformer-based decoder-only language model pre-trained on a large amount of data of codes. Strong code generation capabilities and competitive performance across a series of benchmarks. Supporting long context understanding and generation with the context length of 64K tokens. CodeQwen supports 92 coding languages and provides excellent performance in text-to-SQL, bug fixes, etc. You can just write several lines of code with transformers to chat with CodeQwen. Essentially, we build the tokenizer and the model from pre-trained methods, and we use the generate method to perform chatting with the help of the chat template provided by the tokenizer. We apply the ChatML template for chat models following our previous practice. The model completes the code snippets according to the given prompts, without any additional formatting.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 3
    NVIDIA Cosmos
    NVIDIA Cosmos is a developer-first platform of state-of-the-art generative World Foundation Models (WFMs), advanced video tokenizers, guardrails, and an accelerated data processing and curation pipeline designed to supercharge physical AI development. It enables developers working on autonomous vehicles, robotics, and video analytics AI agents to generate photorealistic, physics-aware synthetic video data, trained on an immense dataset including 20 million hours of real-world and simulated video, to rapidly simulate future scenarios, train world models, and fine‑tune custom behaviors. It includes three core WFM types; Cosmos Predict, capable of generating up to 30 seconds of continuous video from multimodal inputs; Cosmos Transfer, which adapts simulations across environments and lighting for versatile domain augmentation; and Cosmos Reason, a vision-language model that applies structured reasoning to interpret spatial-temporal data for planning and decision-making.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 4
    Nemotron 3 Nano Omni
    NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano Omni is an open, omni-modal foundation model designed to unify perception and reasoning across text, images, audio, video, and documents within a single efficient architecture. It eliminates the need for separate models for each modality, reducing inference latency, orchestration complexity, and cost while maintaining consistent cross-modal context. It is purpose-built for agentic AI systems, acting as a perception and context sub-agent that gives larger AI agents the ability to “see, hear, and read” in real time across screens, recordings, and structured or unstructured data. It supports advanced multimodal reasoning tasks such as document understanding, speech recognition, long audio-video analysis, and computer-use workflows, enabling agents to interpret dynamic interfaces and complex environments. Built with a hybrid architecture optimized for long context and throughput, it can process large inputs like multi-page documents.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 5
    Liquid AI

    Liquid AI

    Liquid AI

    Our goal at Liquid is to build the most capable AI systems to solve problems at every scale, such that users can build, access, and control their AI solutions. This is to ensure that AI will be meaningfully, reliably, and efficiently integrated at all enterprises. Long term, Liquid will create and deploy frontier-AI-powered solutions that are available to everyone. We build white-box models within a white-box organization.
  • 6
    TabPFN-3.5

    TabPFN-3.5

    Prior Labs

    TabPFN-3.5 is a tabular foundation model built for state-of-the-art predictions on structured data. It supports a wide range of prediction tasks, including churn, fraud, pricing, demand forecasting, risk, and other real-world data science problems, allowing teams to serve multiple use cases with one model. The model works with data as it is, handling missing values, outliers, categorical features, multi-table datasets, free text as a feature, thousands of distinct IDs without encoding, and hundreds of measurements per row. Users can feed in raw data, skip feature engineering and preprocessing, and get production-grade predictions from the first predict call. TabPFN-3.5 performs predictions in a single forward pass and is designed for both accuracy and speed, with fast inference for latency-critical predictive workflows. It supports production-scale datasets of up to one million rows natively and delivers 20x faster inference than previous model versions.
  • 7
    Amazon Nova 2 Lite
    Nova 2 Lite is a lightweight, high-speed reasoning model designed to handle everyday AI workloads across text, images, and video. It can generate clear, context-aware responses and lets users fine-tune how much internal reasoning the model performs before producing an answer. This adjustable “thinking depth” gives teams the flexibility to choose faster replies or more detailed problem-solving depending on the task. It stands out for customer service bots, automated document handling, and general business workflow support. Nova 2 Lite delivers strong performance across standard evaluation tests. It performs on par with or better than comparable compact models in most benchmark categories, demonstrating reliable comprehension and response quality. Its strengths include interpreting complex documents, pulling accurate insights from video content, generating usable code, and delivering grounded answers based on provided information.
  • 8
    Nemotron 3
    NVIDIA Nemotron 3 is a family of open large language models developed by NVIDIA to power advanced reasoning, conversational AI, and autonomous AI agents. The Nemotron 3 series includes three models designed for different scales of AI workloads while maintaining high efficiency and accuracy. These models focus on “agentic AI” capabilities, meaning they can perform multi-step reasoning, coordinate with tools, and operate as components within multi-agent systems used in automation, research, and enterprise applications. The architecture uses a hybrid mixture-of-experts (MoE) design combined with transformer-based techniques, allowing the model to activate only a subset of parameters for each task, which improves performance while reducing computational cost. Nemotron 3 models are built to deliver strong reasoning, conversational, and planning abilities while maintaining high throughput for large-scale deployment.
  • 9
    Nemotron 3 Super
    Nemotron-3 Super is part of NVIDIA’s Nemotron 3 family of open models designed to enable advanced agentic AI systems that can reason, plan, and execute multi-step workflows across complex environments. The model introduces a hybrid Mamba-Transformer Mixture-of-Experts architecture that combines the efficiency of state-space Mamba layers with the contextual understanding of transformer attention, allowing it to process long sequences and complex reasoning tasks with high accuracy and throughput. This architecture activates only a subset of model parameters for each token, improving computational efficiency while maintaining strong reasoning capabilities and enabling scalable inference for large workloads. Nemotron-3 Super contains roughly 120 billion parameters with around 12 billion active during inference, accelerating multi-step reasoning and collaborative agent interactions across large contexts.
  • 10
    Nemotron 3 Nano
    Nemotron 3 Nano is the smallest model in the NVIDIA Nemotron 3 family, built for agentic AI applications with strong reasoning, conversational ability, and cost-efficient inference. It is a hybrid Mamba-Transformer Mixture-of-Experts model with 3.2 billion active parameters, 3.6 billion including embeddings, and 31.6 billion total parameters. NVIDIA describes it as more accurate than the previous Nemotron 2 Nano while activating less than half of the parameters per forward pass, improving efficiency without sacrificing performance. The model is positioned as more accurate than GPT-OSS-20B and Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking-2507 on popular benchmarks across different categories. On an 8K input and 16K output setting using a single H200, it delivers inference throughput 3.3 times higher than Qwen3-30B-A3B and 2.2 times higher than GPT-OSS-20B. Nemotron 3 Nano supports context lengths up to 1 million tokens and is reported to outperform GPT-OSS-20B and Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507.
  • 11
    Amazon Nova 2 Omni
    Nova 2 Omni is a fully unified multimodal reasoning and generation model capable of understanding and producing content across text, images, video, and speech. It can take in extremely large inputs, ranging from hundreds of thousands of words to hours of audio and lengthy videos, while maintaining coherent analysis across formats. This allows it to digest full product catalogs, long-form documents, customer testimonials, and complete video libraries all at the same time, giving teams a single system that replaces the need for multiple specialized models. With its ability to handle mixed media in one workflow, Nova 2 Omni opens new possibilities for creative and operational automation. A marketing team, for example, can feed in product specs, brand guidelines, reference images, and video content and instantly generate an entire campaign, including messaging, social content, and visuals, in one pass.
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