Gemma 3 12B vs Seed 1.5-VL

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.

ByteDance

Seed1.5-VL, released by ByteDance Seed on May 15, 2025, is a vision-language foundation model composed of a 532M-parameter vision encoder and a Mixture-of-Experts language model with 20 billion active parameters. It was pretrained on over 3 trillion multimodal tokens and achieved state-of-the-art performance on 38 out of 60 public VLM benchmarks at release. Seed1.5-VL targets complex visual reasoning, OCR, video comprehension, 3D spatial understanding, and multimodal agentic tasks.