Gemma 3 12B vs Grok 4.1 Fast

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.

Grok 4.1 Fast

xAI

Grok 4.1 Fast, released by xAI in November 2025, is a fast-response variant from the Grok 4 family featuring a 2M token context window designed for high-throughput applications. It omits thinking tokens for immediate responses, reducing latency while maintaining strong output quality. Grok 4.1 Fast targets production APIs, real-time assistants, and cost-sensitive applications requiring long-context understanding at high volume.