[SwellJoe]

Gemma 12B? It's unique in the Gemma family, and unique among vision models. It's a novel encoder-less model...the whole model is vision. Somehow. I don't understand it, but it blows away Gemma 4 31B and Qwen 27B in my tests. It's not even close. And, is also tiny and fast, compared to those larger models, so it's better and faster and smaller. Weird combo.

[lambda]

Tried it out. I'm compring against Qwen 3.5 122B-A10B, so a much larger model. It gets some correct, but Qwen 3.5 122B-A10B has done much better. Gemma 4 12B even hallucinated some species in trying to identify a plant, and the other guesses it made weren't all that close, while Qwen 3.5 122B-A10B got it right on the first try.

12B did get one right that 31B got wrong. I'd have to do a much more thorough eval to really compare, just a few anecdotal observations and it's kind of hard to really distinguish, but from the samples I've seen, Qwen 3.5 122B-A10B is doing much better at this task.

The 12B architecture definitely is interesting, and it may punch above its weight due to this (though again, would really need to do proper evals to compare). But of the models I've tried, Qwen3.5 122B-A10B really seems like the best for this kind of task.

[SwellJoe]

Ah, yeah, a model ten times as large on disk will know more, for sure. My tasks are more about "what's happening in this image?" rather than "what is this thing?", which doesn't require encyclopedic knowledge, it need good reasoning about what it's seeing.