Google Ships Gemma 4 12B as Open Multimodal Models Become the New Baseline

Google released Gemma 4, a 12-billion-parameter multimodal model — a size class that, two years ago, couldn't handle text competently. Now it handles images too, and it's open-weight.

Google released Gemma 4 12B, a multimodal open-weight model, as noted in Friday's roundups by @oscarlau. The release continues Google's strategy of shipping capable open models at a cadence that keeps the research community anchored to its ecosystem, even as its closed Gemini line competes with OpenAI and Anthropic at the frontier.

Unlock the full briefing

Get every story in today's briefing, the full archive, and the daily AI intelligence brief.

All stories today

Full archive

Daily brief

Cancel anytime. Payments powered by Stripe.