Gemma 3 12B vs GPT-4.1

Gemma 3 12B

Google DeepMind

Gemma 3 12B is a 12-billion-parameter open-weight model from Google DeepMind, released in March 2025 as part of the Gemma 3 series designed to bring multimodal reasoning to accessible hardware. The model supports both text and image inputs across a 128K token context window, extending the vision capabilities that defined the Gemma 3 generation compared to earlier text-only Gemma releases. It became widely adopted for domain-specific fine-tuning in research and enterprise settings where full multimodal capability was needed without the infrastructure demands of larger frontier models.

GPT-4.1

OpenAI

GPT-4.1, released by OpenAI in April 2025, is a large language model from the GPT-4 family optimized for coding, precise instruction following, and long-context tasks. It features a 1M token context window and native image understanding, with improved performance on tool-calling and web development benchmarks compared to GPT-4o. GPT-4.1 targets software development workflows, long-document analysis, and applications requiring accurate, instruction-adherent outputs.