Gemma 3 12B vs Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B

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-VL-235B-A22B, released by Alibaba's Qwen team in September 2025, is a natively multimodal Mixture-of-Experts large language model with 235 billion total parameters and 22 billion active parameters. It features a 256K token context window (with extrapolation to 1M tokens), native support for text, image, and video input, and joint visual-textual reasoning capabilities. Qwen3-VL-235B targets complex visual reasoning, video understanding, and multimodal agentic tasks under the Apache 2.0 license.