Gemma 4 12B vs GPT-4o
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Gemma 4 12B is meaningfully stronger at long context (80 vs 55 on our capability index).
- •Gemma 4 12B is open-weights (free to self-host); GPT-4o is paid API only.
- •Gemma 4 12B has a 256K tokens context window vs 128,000 tokens (16,384 max output) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| Gemma 4 12B | GPT-4o | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | |
| Type | Open source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓256K tokens | 128,000 tokens (16,384 max output) |
| Input / 1M tokens | ✓Free (self-host) | $2.50 |
| Output / 1M tokens | Free (self-host) | $10.00 |
| Release date | 2026-06 | 2024-05 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Gemma 4 12B | GPT-4o |
|---|---|---|
| Total parameters | ~11.95B | - |
| Context window | 256K tokens | - |
| MMLU | - | 88.7% |
| HumanEval | - | 90.2% |
| MATH | - | 76.6% |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose Gemma 4 12B if...
- →You need an open, self-hostable multimodal model
- →Running on a single consumer GPU or a laptop
- →Data-privacy or on-prem requirements
- →You want a permissive license (Apache 2.0) for commercial use
Choose GPT-4o if...
- →Everyday assistant, drafting, summarization, and classification tasks
- →Latency- and cost-sensitive applications at scale
- →Multimodal tasks needing image understanding with fast responses