Gemma 3 12B vs Llama 3.2 Vision 11b

Gemma 3 12B, announced by Google DeepMind on March 12, 2025, is part of the open-weight Gemma 3 family, designed to provide a balance between capability and accessibility. With around 12 billion parameters, it supports multimodal input (text + images) and outputs text, making it useful for reasoning, summarization, Q&A, and visual understanding tasks. The model supports an input context of 128,000 tokens and typically generates up to ~8,000 tokens in output.

The 12B variant is instruction-tuned (“Gemma-3-12B-IT”) and optimized for multilingual use across more than 140 languages. It can run on a single GPU or TPU, offering a lighter compute footprint than very large proprietary models, while still achieving strong performance in reasoning benchmarks. Quantized and lower-precision variants are available to improve efficiency. Limitations include smaller output lengths relative to input capacity, scaling hardware needs at larger sizes, and performance below massive proprietary models on the most complex multimodal or reasoning-heavy tasks.

Llama 3.2 Vision 11B, released by Meta on September 25, 2024, is the first mid-sized model in the Llama family with vision capabilities, supporting both text and image inputs with text-only outputs. It contains around 11 billion parameters (~10.6B) and features a 128,000-token context window, making it suitable for multimodal reasoning over long documents and image-text tasks. The model was trained on ~6 billion image–text pairs and has a knowledge cutoff of December 2023.

The model is available in a base and an instruction-tuned (“Vision-Instruct”) version, optimized for tasks like captioning, visual question answering, and image reasoning. It leverages Group-Query Attention (GQA) for improved inference efficiency and scalability. While text tasks officially support multiple languages (English, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Hindi, Spanish, Thai), multimodal (image+text) tasks are supported primarily in English. Llama 3.2 Vision 11B is accessible through Hugging Face, Amazon Bedrock, Azure AI Foundry, NVIDIA NIM, and OCI, making it a widely deployable open-weight multimodal foundation model.