The milestone of Gemma 4

I believe Google’s release of Gemma 4 is a quiet milestone, and it might be more con­se­quen­tial to the overall arc of “how we use LLMs” than the mam­moth models now rum­bling behind closed doors.

Google has somehow man­aged to extend Gemini’s visual acuity into these open-weights models. My appli­ca­tion has to do with hand­writing recognition, plus the cal­cu­la­tion of bounding boxes for blobs of text, and the 31B ver­sion per­forms as well as Gemini 3 Flash … and nearly as well as Gemini 3.1 Pro?! (This isn’t just vibes, but quan­ti­ta­tive scoring.) Yet Gemma 4 31B is a model I can run how­ever and wher­ever I want … it runs (quantized) on my old 2017-era deep learning rig with its three 12GB GPUs. It runs in the secure enclaves on Tinfoil.

A big bril­liant model is cool, but I do not find it exciting in the way I find Gemma 4.