Gemma 3 12B vs Skywork-R1V3-38B

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.

Kunlun Tech

Skywork-R1V3-38B, released by Kunlun Tech's Skywork AI team on July 9, 2025, is a 38 billion parameter multimodal reasoning model built on InternVL-38B with reinforcement learning post-training that enhances both visual and textual reasoning. It uses the GRPO algorithm and cold-start fine-tuning to improve reasoning across image and text modalities. Skywork-R1V3-38B targets open-source multimodal reasoning deployments requiring strong performance across vision-language benchmarks.