Gemma 4 12B is almost as capable as the version with 26 billion parameters.
Credit: Google
Gemma 4 12B is almost as capable as the version with 26 billion parameters.
Credit: Google
Google says the new model is capable of performing complex multi-step reasoning and agentic workflows that previously required larger variants of Gemma. Despite the smaller number of parameters, Gemma 4 12B comes with the new design Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) Writerswhich take advantage of unused processing cycles to calculate possible future tokens. The result is greater speed and efficiency. Google has released optional MTP versions of the other Gemma 4 models, but this is the first to have MTP out of the box.
Gemma 4 12B is also more efficient thanks to a new approach to multimodality. The Gemma 4 family is natively multimodal and accepts text, audio or images as input. Most generation AI models, including the other variants of Gemma 4, use dedicated encoders to process non-text input and pass that data to the LLM. This works quite well, but increases latency and memory usage.
With the new midweight model, Google has implemented a vision-optimized embedding module, which features single matrix multiplication and positional embedding, allowing data to be passed to the LLM with appropriate spatial awareness. This eliminates the need for a bulky intermediary encoder. For audio, there is no encoding. The developers developed a method to project the raw audio signal onto the same vectors used for the text tokens.
If you want to check out the new Gemma 4 model, you can access it without downloading it through tools like LM Studio Google AI Edge Galleryand more. But the general idea with Gemma 4 12B is that you can run it locally and on your own terms. If you have RAM, model weights are available for immediate download at kaggle and hugging face. It is only 18 GB.
