Google’s Lightweight Gemma 3 Open Model Nearly Matches DeepSeek R1

Google has introduced the Gemma 3 series of open models, and they look pretty incredible, given the small size. The search giant says Gemma 3 models can be loaded on a single Nvidia H100 GPU, and it matches the performance of much larger models. To begin with, it brings 1B, 4B, 12B, and 27B AI models. These models can be locally used on laptops and smartphones.

Except for the smallest Gemma 3 1B model, all models are inherently multimodal meaning they can process images and videos as well. Not only that, Gemma 3 models are multilingual and support over 140 languages. Despite the small size, Google has done a commendable job packing so much knowledge into a small footprint.

As for performance, the largest 27B model outperforms significantly larger models such as DeepSeek V3 671B, Llama 3.1 405B, Mistral Large, and o3-mini in the LMSYS Chatbot Arena. Gemma 3 27B achieved an Elo score of 1,338 on the Chatbot Arena and ranks just below the DeepSeek R1 reasoning model which scored 1,363.

It’s quite astonishing to see that such a small model is performing along the lines of frontier models. Google says it has used “a novel post-training approach that brings gains across all capabilities, including math, coding, chat, instruction following, and multilingual.“

On top of that, Gemma 3 models are trained on an improved version of knowledge distillation. As a result, the 27B model almost matches Gemini 1.5 Flash performance.

Finally, Gemma 3 models have a context window of 128K, and bring support for function calling, and structured output. It looks like Google has delivered a very competitive open model in a small size to take on DeepSeek R1 and Llama 3 405B models. Developers would be quite happy to use Gemma 3 which is multimodal and multilingual with the ability to host open weights.