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Google battles Chinese open weights models with Gemma 4
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Google on Thursday unleashed a wave of new open-weights Gemma models optimized for agentic AI and coding, under a more permissive Apache 2.0 license aimed at winning over enterprises.
Key facts
- Gemma 4 is available in Google's AI Studio and AI Edge Gallery services, as well as popular model repos like Hugging Face, Kaggle, and Ollama
- According to Google, the model can run unquantized at 16-bit on a single 80 GB H100
- During inference, a subset of the model's 128 experts, totaling 3.8 billion active parameters, is used to process and generate each token
- But Gemma 4's most significant change is perhaps the switch to a more permissive Apache 2.0 license, which gives enterprises much more flexibility as to how and where they can use or deploy the models
Summary
The launch comes amidst an onslaught of open-weights Chinese large language models (LLMs) from Moonshot AI, Alibaba, and Z.AI, many of which now rival OpenAI's GPT-5 or Anthropic's Claude. With its latest release, Google is offering enterprise customers a domestic alternative, but one that won't hoover up sensitive corporate data to train future models. Developed by Google's DeepMind team, the fourth generation of Gemma models brings several improvements, including "advanced reasoning" to improve performance in math and instruction-following, support for more than 140 languages, native function calling, and video and audio inputs. As with prior Gemma models, Google is making them available in multiple sizes to address applications ranging from single board computers and smartphones to laptops and enterprise datacenters.