Wow Google is becoming the new pre Llama 4 Meta when it comes to releasing open weights models.
Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model
11–20 of 421 posts
Re: Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model
#12The big story here is the encoder-free part, which I still don't fully understand. > Vision: We replaced Gemma 4’s vision encoder with a lightweight embedding module consisting of a single matrix multiplication, positional embedding and normalizations. That's technically encoding, just without using a dedicated model for it like SigLIP? The Developer's Guide elaborates, it's still a 35M layer which I am curious is ro…
Re: Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model
#13Is it simply goodwill and/or marketing? Or am I missing something strategic?
Re: Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model
#14The big story here is the encoder-free part, which I still don't fully understand. > Vision: We replaced Gemma 4’s vision encoder with a lightweight embedding module consisting of a single matrix multiplication, positional embedding and normalizations. That's technically encoding, just without using a dedicated model for it like SigLIP? The Developer's Guide elaborates, it's still a 35M layer which I am curious is ro…
> That's technically encoding Isn't that just projecting the patches into the d_model size vectors that the models takes? >I am assuming that involves of quantization 12B model in 16GB seems very reasonable to me, int8 is top quality for running models.
12B at int8 would take up 12G memory, or 75% of the system memory which technically fits within 16GB but the OS will not like that. EDIT: On my 18G memory MacBook Pro, LM Studio reports a "partial GPU offload" for the int8 MLX weights. Can't test because the `gemma_unified" architecture is NYI.
Re: Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model
#15Wow Google is becoming the new pre Llama 4 Meta when it comes to releasing open weights models.
Re: Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model
#16What's Google's business case for releasing open models? Don't get me wrong, I am grateful and appreciative of these releases. I'm trying to understand how it fits into their bigger picture as a for profit company? Are they not helping competitors build on the novel technology they have developed? Is it simply goodwill and/or marketing? Or am I missing something strategic?
Re: Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model
#17Re: Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model
#18What's Google's business case for releasing open models? Don't get me wrong, I am grateful and appreciative of these releases. I'm trying to understand how it fits into their bigger picture as a for profit company? Are they not helping competitors build on the novel technology they have developed? Is it simply goodwill and/or marketing? Or am I missing something strategic?
I'm pretty sure they are doing it because they get some research experience by shrinking and improving these models, and because they know that by doing this they get some good PR among the dev community.
Re: Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model
#19What's Google's business case for releasing open models? Don't get me wrong, I am grateful and appreciative of these releases. I'm trying to understand how it fits into their bigger picture as a for profit company? Are they not helping competitors build on the novel technology they have developed? Is it simply goodwill and/or marketing? Or am I missing something strategic?
Re: Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model
#20What's Google's business case for releasing open models? Don't get me wrong, I am grateful and appreciative of these releases. I'm trying to understand how it fits into their bigger picture as a for profit company? Are they not helping competitors build on the novel technology they have developed? Is it simply goodwill and/or marketing? Or am I missing something strategic?
The question is: do you want to release your models, or use them purely for R&D?
Since everyone else is already releasing models of similar qualities, it's hard to say you're shooting yourself in the foot if you join the chorus.
The added cannibalization of releasing them is effectively zero, so the reputational benefits are likely to be worth it.