Google launches Gemma 4 AI model

Google has introduced its latest open artificial intelligence model, Gemma 4, marking a significant step toward open AI development. The new model, released on April 2, is both open-weight and fully open source, licensed under the widely used Apache License 2.0.

Unlike many advanced AI systems that remain restricted, Gemma 4 allows developers to freely download, modify, and deploy the model without paying royalties. The license only requires attribution and that the license be distributed with the model.

What makes Gemma 4 different?

Gemma 4 is part of Google’s family of large language models (LLMs) and is built using the same research and technology used by Gemini 3, developed by Google DeepMind.

However, it differs from Gemini, which powers many Google services and operates as a proprietary product. Gemini is integrated into tools such as Google Search, Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Cloud.

Gemma 4, by contrast, is designed for open development. Developers can run the model locally on their own hardware, including some laptop GPUs and even billions of Android devices. This also means users can run the model without an internet connection, improving privacy since chats and uploaded files are not shared with third parties.

Google says Gemma 4 is its most capable open AI model yet. Key improvements include:

Advanced reasoning and multi-step planning
Better performance in mathematics and instruction-following tasks
Support for agent-based workflows
AI coding assistance
Ability to process audio, video, and visual data, including charts and images

The model has been trained on more than 140 languages and offers a context window of up to 256,000 tokens, enabling it to handle longer and more complex prompts.

Gemma 4 is available in four variants based on the number of parameters:

2 billion parameters
4 billion parameters
26 billion parameters
31 billion parameters

Developers can access both pre-trained and instruction-tuned versions, providing greater flexibility for different applications.

Gemma 4 can be tested or downloaded through several platforms, including:

Google AI Studio
Hugging Face
Kaggle
Ollama

Because it is fully open source, developers and organizations can integrate Gemma 4 into their own applications without ongoing subscription fees.