Gemma 4 12B vs o1
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Gemma 4 12B is meaningfully stronger at cost efficiency (92 vs 35 on our capability index).
- •o1 is meaningfully stronger at math (88 vs 65).
- •Gemma 4 12B is open-weights (free to self-host); o1 is paid API only.
- •Gemma 4 12B has a 256K tokens context window vs 200,000 tokens (100,000 max output) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| Gemma 4 12B | o1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | |
| Type | Open source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓256K tokens | 200,000 tokens (100,000 max output) |
| Input / 1M tokens | ✓Free (self-host) | $15.00 |
| Output / 1M tokens | Free (self-host) | $60.00 |
| Release date | 2026-06 | 2024-12 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Gemma 4 12B | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| Total parameters | ~11.95B | - |
| Context window | 256K tokens | - |
| AIME 2024 | - | 74% |
| GPQA Diamond | - | 77.3% |
| Codeforces | - | ~89th percentile |
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 o1 if...
- →Hard, multi-step math, science, and logic problems that reward deliberate reasoning
- →Competitive programming and algorithmic problem solving
- →Existing o1-based pipelines already validated for reasoning tasks