Gemma 3 12B vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B

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.

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen3.5-397B-A17B is a 397-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model from Alibaba's Qwen team, released in February 2026 as the open-weight flagship of the Qwen3.5 series, featuring 17 billion active parameters per forward pass through a hybrid linear-attention and sparse-MoE architecture based on Gated Delta Networks. The model was co-trained on text, images, and video using early fusion, making it natively multimodal across a 262K token context window, while achieving significantly higher inference throughput than comparable dense models due to its sparse computation design. At release it was one of the most capable open-weight models publicly available, offered under Apache 2.0 and accessible through Alibaba's DashScope API as the Qwen3.5-Plus endpoint.