Gemma 3 27B vs GPT-5 Mini

Gemma 3 27B

Google DeepMind

Gemma 3 27B is a 27-billion-parameter open-weight model from Google DeepMind, released in March 2025 alongside the Gemma 3 12B as the higher-capability variant in the series, built with native vision-language support for text and image inputs across a 128K token context window. Among the Gemma 3 releases, the 27B delivered the strongest results on instruction-following and knowledge-intensive reasoning tasks, making it the preferred option for developers needing greater accuracy from a self-hostable model. Its open-weight availability under a permissive license made it a common starting point for vision-language fine-tuning projects.

GPT-5 Mini

OpenAI

GPT-5 mini, released by OpenAI in August 2025, is a smaller variant from the GPT-5 family that inherits GPT-5's unified reasoning architecture and multimodal capabilities at a reduced inference cost. It targets high-volume production use cases requiring a balance of intelligence and response speed, offering GPT-5 capabilities for applications where full GPT-5 inference costs are a concern.