Gemma 3 12B vs Kimi K2 Thinking

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.

Moonshot AI

Kimi K2 Thinking, released by Moonshot AI on November 6, 2025, is a reasoning-focused variant of Kimi K2 with 1 trillion total parameters and 32 billion active parameters, featuring extended chain-of-thought processing for complex problem solving. It builds on K2's agentic coding strengths with additional capabilities for mathematical and scientific reasoning. Kimi K2 Thinking targets open-source deployments requiring deep, deliberate reasoning across coding and analytical domains.