Status check (2026-09-30)
Gemma 4 is Google’s current open-weight family: E2B, E4B, 31B dense and 26B A4B MoE (Apache 2.0 per press; Google docs mention a “Gemma 4 license”), plus MTP variants (2026-04-16) and Gemma 4 12B Unified (2026-06-03). Release date: Google’s release page says 2026-03-31, press says 2026-04-02 (sources differ). No Gemma 5 found. Context up to 256K.
Gemma 4
by Google DeepMind
Google’s open-weight model family delivering near-frontier performance on consumer and edge hardware — multimodal, efficient, and Apache 2.0 licensed.
See https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/gemma-4/
Model specs
- Parameters: multiple sizes including 26B and 31B variants (Mixture of Experts architecture)
- Context window: 256K tokens
- Modalities: text, vision (images), audio, video input; text output
- Release date: April 2026
Capabilities
- Multimodal reasoning: vision + text tasks (demonstrated with F1 Donut simulation, product image analysis)
- Frontend and UI code generation — competitive with frontier models in practical demos
- Agentic tool use and function calling
- Reasoning and instruction following
- Local deployment on consumer hardware — tested at ~3,005 tokens/s on Mac Studio M2
- Fine-tuning support (LoRA and full fine-tune); serverless inference on Google Cloud
- Edge and on-device AI deployment
- Open-weight: download and self-host under Apache 2.0 license
Benchmark highlights
- Achieves near-frontier performance while being significantly more token-efficient than models of comparable quality
- 31B vs 26B: 31B produces higher-quality frontend generation outputs; 26B is faster for iteration
- Surprised the AI industry with quality-to-size ratio at April 2026 launch
- Runs locally on Mac M2 at speeds previously requiring cloud infrastructure for comparable models
- Strong multimodal benchmark results across visual reasoning and document understanding tasks
Access
- Open-weight download via HuggingFace and Google’s model hub (Apache 2.0)
- Local inference: Ollama (
ollama pull gemma4), llama.cpp, Open WebUI - Google Cloud: serverless inference via Vertex AI
- Google AI Studio: free web access for testing
- No per-token API cost for self-hosted deployments
Sources
- https://ai.google.dev/gemma/docs/releases (2026-09-30)
- https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/04/google-gemm4/ (search snippet, 2026-09-30)