Gemma 3 27B vs Qwen3-Max

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.

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen3-Max, released by Alibaba in September 2025 as an API preview, is a large language model exceeding one trillion parameters built for complex reasoning and long-context tasks. It features a 262K token context window, hybrid thinking modes that allow switching between direct generation and extended chain-of-thought, and is available as a proprietary cloud API via Alibaba Cloud and Qwen Chat. Qwen3-Max targets demanding reasoning, multilingual analysis, and applications requiring frontier-level performance from the Qwen3 generation.