Google just released the latest version of its open AI model, Gemma 4, on Thursday. Worst of all, Gemma 4 is a fully open source model licensed under Apache 2.0, which is not the case with borderline models.
Open models can be run locally on users’ devices, and Google says Gemma 4 can be used on “billions of Android devices” with other portable GPUs.
“This open source license provides the foundation for complete developer flexibility and digital sovereignty; it gives you complete control over your data, infrastructure, and models,” reads a Google blog post. “It allows you to build freely and deploy securely in any environment, whether on-premises or in the cloud.”
Many people may have heard of Google’s popular Gemini AI model, thanks to the ubiquitous AI chatbot integrated into many Google products.
Gemma is also a large-scale language model (LLM) and was developed from the same technology and research used by Google DeepMind to build Gemini 3.
Google calls Gemma 4 its “most capable” open source AI model yet.
Gemma vs. Gemini?
So, how is Gemma different from Gemini?
Gemini is Google’s proprietary AI product, and the name of Google’s family of multimodal AI models. Gemini is integrated into nearly all of Google’s core products, including Google Search, Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Cloud.
Gemma 4, however, is an open AI model, meaning that the code and data it’s trained on is shared with its user base. Gemma AI models can be run on the user’s local hardware, even without an Internet connection. Anyone can download Gemma 4 and run it on their device for free. These open AI models provide private and highly secure information, as no conversations, uploaded files, or responses are shared with a third party.
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Developers can use open AI models like Gemma 4 to integrate AI into their applications without the need for any recurring subscription costs.
What is Gemma 4?
Gemma 4 brings some advanced capabilities to Google’s open AI model family.
According to Google’s announcement, Gemma 4 is now capable of advanced reasoning, including multi-step programming and deep reasoning. Google says it has made “significant improvements in the calculations and subsequent benchmarks it needs” with Gemma 4.
Gemma 4 now also supports processes required for the execution of an agent’s work and localizes the help of AI code. In addition, Gemma 4 can process audio and video for speech recognition and interpret visuals such as charts.
The Gemma 4 is available in four sizes based on the amount of weight used to power the model: two billion, four billion, 26 billion, and 31 billion.
Hugging Face reports that these open-weight models are available in a variety of pre-trained and tuned instructions, offering more flexibility to developers.
The AI model is trained in more than 140 languages and has a content window of up to 256,000 tokens, according to Google. (The smaller E2B and E4B variants have a core window of 128,000, however.)
Gemma 4 is now unlocked again open source
Now, opening does not mean open source when it comes to AI models.
Previous iterations of Gemma were open source (meaning the training datasets were publicly available) but were still bound by Google’s policies, even if users were allowed to download the model to their device. Although users could modify the local LLM, they still had to work under Google’s rules on its use and redistribution.
With Gemma 4, Google has now made the model open again open source.
Google distributes Gemma 4 under the popular open source software license Apache 2.0.
Under this license, anyone can download and modify Gemma 4 and use it for any purpose, whether for personal or commercial use cases. Gemma 4 can be redistributed without royalty requirements. Basically, the only requirement under the Apache 2.0 license is attribution, and the license must be distributed alongside the AI model.
Looking for Gemma 4? It’s hot to try.
Gemma 4 can be found in the Google AI studio and can be downloaded from third parties such as Hugging Face, Kaggle, or Ollama.
