Gemma 3 12B vs Nova 2 Lite

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.

Nova 2 Lite

Amazon

Amazon Nova 2 Lite, released by Amazon Web Services on December 2, 2025, is a fast, cost-efficient reasoning model available on Amazon Bedrock with a 1M token context window enabling extended document, video, and image analysis. It features three extended thinking intensity levels, built-in code interpreter, web grounding tools, and native support for text, image, video, and document input. Nova 2 Lite targets cost-sensitive agentic applications, document analysis pipelines, and real-time workloads requiring multimodal reasoning.