Welcome Gemma 4: Frontier multimodal intelligence on device
What changed
These models are the real deal: truly open with Apache 2 licenses, high quality with pareto frontier arena scores, multimodal including audio, and sizes you can use everywhere including on-device. In our tests with pre-release checkpoints we have been impressed by their capabilities, to the extent that we struggled to find good fine-tuning examples because they are so good out of the box. Google has released Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) drafters for the Gemma 4 family: small assistant models that accelerate inference via speculative decoding.
Why it matters
A concrete addition to Practical AI: Tools, Models & Frameworks: it changes what's available to builders today rather than being general commentary.
How it compares
Related prior coverage to compare against:
- Welcome Gemma 2 - Google’s new open LLM
- Welcome Gemma - Google’s new open LLM
- Welcome Gemma 3: Google's all new multimodal, multilingual, long context open LLM
Sources
- Welcome Gemma 4: Frontier multimodal intelligence on device (huggingface-blog)primary