A New Era for Open Source AI
Google has just announced Gemma 4, its most capable open source AI model family to date, and the AI community is buzzing with excitement. This release represents a significant milestone in the democratization of artificial intelligence, with Google switching from its previously criticized custom license to the widely accepted Apache 2.0 license.
The Gemma 4 family includes four versatile sizes: Effective 2B (E2B), Effective 4B (E4B), 26B Mixture of Experts (MoE), and 31B Dense models. Built from the same world-class research and technology as Gemini 3, these models deliver an unprecedented level of intelligence-per-parameter.
Breaking Records in Open AI Performance
The 31B model currently ranks as the #3 open model in the world on the industry-standard Arena AI text leaderboard, while the 26B model secures the #6 spot. Perhaps most impressively, these models outcompete systems that are 20 times their size, demonstrating remarkable efficiency.
Since the launch of the first Gemma generation, developers have downloaded Gemma over 400 million times, building a vibrant Gemmaverse of more than 100,000 variants. With Gemma 4, Google is clearly aiming to accelerate this momentum.
Apache 2.0 License: What Changed
Previous versions of Gemma used a custom license that drew criticism from the open source community for being too restrictive. With Gemma 4, Google has made a decisive shift to the Apache 2.0 license, which is commercially permissive, royalty-free, flexible, and internationally recognized.
Key Capabilities of Gemma 4
Gemma 4 offers advanced reasoning with multi-step planning, agentic workflows with native function-calling, high-quality offline code generation, vision and audio processing, and extended context windows up to 256K tokens. The models support over 140 languages natively.
Getting Started
Developers can access Gemma 4 immediately through Google AI Studio, Hugging Face, Kaggle, and Ollama. With this release, Google has made it clear that open source AI can be both powerful and accessible.