Curiosity · AI Model

Gemma 3 27B

Gemma 3 27B is Google DeepMind's March 2025 open-weights flagship — a 27B dense transformer derived from Gemini research with native vision input, 128K context, and multilingual pretraining. Released under the Gemma license, it's the strongest single-GPU open model Google has shipped to date.

Model specs

Vendor
Google
Family
Gemma 3
Released
2025-03
Context window
128,000 tokens
Modalities
text, vision
Input price
$0.1/M tok
Output price
$0.2/M tok
Pricing as of
2026-04-20

Strengths

  • Open weights under Gemma license — commercial use permitted
  • Native multimodality — text and vision from pretraining
  • Single-GPU deployable at FP16 on H100 80GB
  • Strong multilingual coverage — 140+ languages in pretraining

Limitations

  • Gemma license includes responsible-use restrictions
  • Trails Llama 4 Maverick and DeepSeek V3 on top-end reasoning
  • Vision quality below Gemini 2.5 Flash — good but not SOTA
  • Tool-use and agentic fine-tuning less polished than closed Gemini

Use cases

  • Multimodal assistants combining text and vision on-prem
  • Document RAG with mixed text and screenshot content
  • Research baselines for Gemini-adjacent open models
  • Fine-tuning base for enterprise vision-language workloads

Benchmarks

BenchmarkScoreAs of
MMLU-Pro≈67%2025-03
HumanEval≈85%2025-03
LMArena ELO≈13382025-03

Frequently asked questions

What is Gemma 3 27B?

Google DeepMind's March 2025 open-weights flagship — a 27B multimodal dense transformer derived from Gemini research. Supports text and vision input with a 128K context window.

How does Gemma 3 compare to Gemini 2.5?

Gemini 2.5 Pro remains Google's closed flagship and is meaningfully stronger on agentic and long-context tasks. Gemma 3 27B is the open, self-host-friendly alternative at a much smaller footprint.

Can Gemma 3 27B run on a single GPU?

Yes — at FP16 it fits on an H100 80GB, and quantized to 4-bit it runs on a 24GB consumer GPU with moderate performance hits.

Sources

  1. Google — Gemma 3 blog — accessed 2026-04-20
  2. Hugging Face — google/gemma-3-27b-it — accessed 2026-04-20