Gemma 4

What is it?

Gemma 4 is the 2026 open-weight release from Google DeepMind, descended from the same research lineage as Gemini. The family ships in several sizes — from laptop-friendly 2B to data-centre-grade 27B and beyond — with both base and instruction-tuned variants, released under the Gemma Terms of Use that permit commercial deployment.

What does it do?

Gemma 4 handles chat, reasoning, code generation, tool use, multimodal image understanding, and structured output. It supports extended context windows (128k+), grouped-query attention for efficient inference, and integrates natively with vLLM, llama.cpp, Ollama, Hugging Face Transformers, and Google's Vertex AI for managed serving.

Where is it used?

Gemma 4 is deployed where teams need strong open-weight model capability without sending data to a hosted API: privacy-sensitive RAG over corporate documents, on-device AI features, fine-tuning pipelines for domain-specific assistants, offline coding copilots, and research workflows that demand reproducibility.

When & why it emerged

The Gemma series began in 2024 to bring Google's internal model research to open deployment. Each generation has tightened the gap between closed frontier models and self-hostable ones; Gemma 4 (2026) is the first where mid-sized open weights consistently beat the previous generation's top-tier hosted APIs on standard reasoning and code benchmarks.

Why we use it at Internative

Gemma 4 is our default recommendation when clients want open-weight AI they can fully control. We fine-tune it on client corpora for private RAG, deploy it on vLLM for production inference, and use Ollama-hosted Gemma 4 for on-laptop prototypes during discovery workshops. Gemma's permissive license makes it safer to ship into regulated industries than many 'open' competitors.