Gemma 4
Google DeepMind's open-weight model family with multimodal input and up to 256K context.
About
Apache 2.0 licensing is the headline of Gemma 4, the first release in Google DeepMind's open-weight line to drop the custom Gemma terms that complicated commercial use. The April 2026 family spans four sizes: efficient E2B and E4B variants built for phones and edge hardware, a 26B mixture-of-experts model, and a 31B dense flagship that debuted as the third-ranked open model on the LMArena text leaderboard with the 26B in sixth. All sizes accept images alongside text, the smaller variants take native audio input, and context windows reach 128K on the small models and 256K on the larger ones, with coverage of more than 140 languages. Weights download from Hugging Face, Kaggle, and Ollama and run through transformers, llama.cpp, and the usual local stacks; the E2B and E4B models fit consumer hardware without a discrete GPU, while Google serves the whole family through AI Studio and Vertex AI for hosted use. For teams that skipped earlier Gemma releases over licensing friction, this generation removes the objection entirely.
Should you use Gemma 4?
Pick it when
Pick this as a default open model when you need Apache-2.0 terms across phone-sized E2B and E4B and larger 26B MoE or 31B dense models, with image input, native audio on the small sizes, and up to 256K context.
Look elsewhere when
Skip it if you need frontier-scale capability or long-horizon agentic coding: the largest model is 31B. GLM-5, Kimi K2, or DeepSeek-V4 go further at cluster scale, and Devstral is more specialized for coding agents.
Alternatives to Gemma 4
- Qwen3.8
Qwen3.8-27B is Apache-2.0 with image and video input and strong coding scores, and the family scales to a 2.4T flagship Gemma lacks.
- Muse Glimmer
Apache-2.0 30B tuned for function calling and agent recovery with a speculative drafter, but it needs a 24 GB GPU where Gemma's E-sizes do not.
- Gemma 3
Previous generation under the custom Gemma License, worth it only if you depend on its JAX tooling or existing fine-tunes.
- MiniCPM
Apache-2.0 compact models down to a 1B dense size for on-device use, with images handled by a separate MiniCPM-V line, not one family.
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Details
- Category
- Large Language Models (LLMs)
- Price
- Free
- Platform
- Local/Desktop
- Difficulty
- Easy (2/5)
- License
- Apache-2.0
- Added
- Aug 24, 2026