Model comparison
Gemma 3 12B vs Mercury
Mercury is the stronger model overall, scoring 37.6 to 32.1 on the Noometry Index.
Last verified . 8 shared benchmarks.
GoogleSummary
- They share 8 benchmarks with published results for both. Gemma 3 12B scores higher in 4 categories and Mercury in 2 categories; 6 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in coding, where Mercury leads 38.7 to 31.7.
- Gemma 3 12B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.
Side by side
| Gemma 3 12B | Mercury | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Inception | |
| Noometry Index | 32.1 | 37.6 |
| Released | 2025-03-12 | — |
| Weights | Open | Proprietary |
| Context window | 131K | — |
| Max output | 8K | — |
| Input $ / M tokens | $0.05 | — |
| Output $ / M tokens | $0.15 | — |
| Results tracked | 24 | 9 |
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Category by category
Coding Mercury leads
Gemma 3 12B: 31.7 (#280), Mercury: 38.7 (#170)
| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1281 | 1322 |
| SciCode | 17.4% | — |
Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable
Gemma 3 12B: 25.5 (#108), Mercury: —
| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | 30.4% | — |
Reasoning Mercury leads
Gemma 3 12B: 15.7 (#313), Mercury: 17.5 (#293)
| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1309 | 1285 |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 21.6% |
| CritPt | 0% | — |
| Chess Puzzles | 0% | — |
| DTBench | 48.8% | — |
| LMCA | 4.5% | — |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 123.5 | — |
Math Not comparable
Gemma 3 12B: 22.3 (#279), Mercury: —
| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 16.7% | — |
| LMArena Math | 1307 | — |
Knowledge Not comparable
Gemma 3 12B: 26.5 (#257), Mercury: —
| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 39.5% | — |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 4.4% | — |
| LMArena Expert | 1248 | — |
Multimodal Not comparable
Gemma 3 12B: —, Mercury: —
| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| MindCube | 46.7% | — |
Multilingual Gemma 3 12B leads
Gemma 3 12B: 45.7 (#165), Mercury: 41.6 (#206)
| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1318 | 1260 |
| LMArena German | 1370 | — |
| LMArena Russian | 1335 | — |
Instruction Following Gemma 3 12B leads
Gemma 3 12B: 68.6 (#186), Mercury: 65.2 (#224)
| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1299 | 1239 |
Long Context Gemma 3 12B leads
Gemma 3 12B: 40.0 (#162), Mercury: 38.4 (#198)
| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1317 | 1266 |
Writing & Preference Gemma 3 12B leads
Gemma 3 12B: 47.5 (#209), Mercury: 46.2 (#221)
| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1334 | 1282 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1331 | 1191 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1334 | 1282 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 1126 | — |
Frequently asked questions
Is Gemma 3 12B better than Mercury?
Mercury is the stronger model overall, scoring 37.6 to 32.1 on the Noometry Index.
Is Gemma 3 12B or Mercury better for coding?
Mercury scores higher on coding benchmarks: 38.7 versus 31.7 in the Noometry coding category.
How many benchmarks do Gemma 3 12B and Mercury share?
8 benchmarks have published results for both models. Gemma 3 12B has 24 scored results on Noometry and Mercury has 9.