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Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model

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Re: Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model

#31

Post by Mr_P »

ethanpil wrote: post #13

What'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?

Android and Chrome need on-device AI capabilities. Google can't lock down those weights like it can with server-side ML.

So it's easier to just release those models as open source and make it official, since someone would inevitably hack the weights out anyway.

Re: Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model

#32

Post by Zambyte »

Is this Mac only? Or is that an Ollama issue that it only supports this release of models on Mac? It seems like every tag with the MLX badge is only supported on Mac[0], and that includes all of the tags in this release.

[0] https://ollama.com/library/gemma4/tags

Edit: MLX being Mac-only is independent of the model being MLX (and therefore Mac) only. The latter is what I am asking about.

Re: Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model

#33

Post by randomNumber7 »

> Novel unified architecture: No multimodal encoders. The vision and audio inputs flow directly into the LLM backbone.

I would be interested in how this actually works. I couldn't find a description of the model architecture (and I did check the links in the Google blog)

Re: Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model

#34

Post by brianwawok »

nickandbro wrote: post #3

Wow Google is becoming the new pre Llama 4 Meta when it comes to releasing open weights models.

Every other Google model I have tried felt very weak compared to qwen models. I dont have a ton of use case for multimodal though, so its very possible this is a fantastic multimodal model.

Re: Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model

#37

Post by embedding-shape »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #29
embedding-shape wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, feels a bit unfair to companies that actually do FOSS releases (Gemma 4 being released under Apache 2.0 license) to compare them to a company that never done any FOSS releases, and mostly done proprietary "available to download" releases.

Note that a binary released under Apache 2.0 license does not yet make it FOSS.

Agreed, miles ahead though from "proprietary" which is what Meta been using for most model releases.

Ideally companies would share the fucking datasets and training code already, but no, no one wants to talk about the source of those or even share the ones they have as then who knows what comes out of Pandora's box...

Re: Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model

#39

Post by [deleted] »

ethanpil wrote: post #13

What'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?

[deleted]

Re: Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model

#40

Post by embedding-shape »

Zambyte wrote: post #32

Is this Mac only? Or is that an Ollama issue that it only supports this release of models on Mac? It seems like every tag with the MLX badge is only supported on Mac[0], and that includes all of the tags in this release. [0] https://ollama.com/library/gemma4/tags Edit: MLX being Mac-only is independent of the model being MLX (and therefore Mac) only. The latter is what I am asking about.

MLX is quite literally macOS-specific technology, for other platforms you want non-MLX.

I was sure "MLX" stood for "Metal-something-something" but can't find any reference to that somehow, anywho, "Metal" is hardware-accelerated graphics on Apple platforms FWIW.

Edit: about the actual release on Ollama, if you're on non-Apple hardware you probably want the NVFP4 variant ("gemma4:12b-nvfp4") which was uploaded 45 minutes ago, especially if you're with a recent nvidia GPU.

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