Gemma 3 4B vs GPT-6 Sol

Gemma 3 4B, released on March 12, 2025, is the mid-sized member of Google DeepMind’s open-weight Gemma 3 family. With about 4 billion parameters, it is multimodal—supporting text and image inputs and generating text outputs. Like the larger Gemma 3 models, it features a 128,000-token input context window with an output capacity of ~8,192 tokens, enabling it to handle long documents and mixed text–image reasoning tasks.

The 4B variant is designed as a balance between efficiency and capability: it offers multilingual support across 140+ languages, strong summarization and reasoning performance, and compatibility with moderate hardware. Inference can run with ~6.4 GB VRAM in BF16, or significantly less in quantized 8-bit (~4.4 GB) or 4-bit (~3.4 GB) modes, making it accessible to developers outside large-scale infrastructure. While it lags behind the 12B and 27B versions on the most complex reasoning and multimodal benchmarks, its lower compute footprint makes it ideal for research, prototyping, and practical deployment where efficiency matters.

GPT-6 Sol is a proprietary multimodal reasoning model from OpenAI, released on September 22, 2026 alongside GPT-6 Luna as an efficiency-oriented tier of the GPT-6 family that began with GPT-6 Astra. OpenAI states that Sol and Luna are trained with methods similar to those used for Astra, carrying the same work on professional tasks, factuality, coding, computer use, and alignment into models that run faster. Sol accepts text and image input and returns text output, and OpenAI documents a context window of roughly one million tokens together with a knowledge cutoff of April 20, 2026.

The model targets complex coding and agentic workflows and exposes a configurable reasoning effort setting with levels of none, low, medium, high, xhigh, and max, which trades latency and token consumption against answer quality. OpenAI reports results including 33.2% on AutomationBench at xhigh effort and 56.4% on Agents' Last Exam at max effort, while its reported DeepSWE and OSWorld 2.0 figures of 68.8% and 64.4% fall below those of the earlier GPT-5.6 Sol. Its vision behavior covers image understanding tasks such as visual question answering, captioning, document and chart interpretation, and text recognition.