Google DeepMind has unveiled Gemma 4 12B, a next-generation open-weights model featuring a unified, encoder-free multimodal architecture. By eliminating the traditional separate vision encoder (such as ViT), it processes diverse modalities directly within a single Transformer network. This design simplifies training, reduces inference latency, and enhances cross-modal alignment, marking a significant milestone for open-source AI.
A r/LocalLLaMA post notes that Gemma 4’s chat template now has “preserve thinking.” The linked discussion points to google/gemma-4-31B-it on Hugging Face, suggesting a template-level change rather than a new model release or benchmark. The original post does not provide detailed usage notes, defaults, compatibility information, or measured effects.
ggml-org/llama.cpp merged PR #24277 by ggerganov, titled “kv-cache: avoid kv cells copies.” The Reddit post says the change improves MTP performance for Gemma-4 and was merged the previous day. It is available starting with the b9551 release, making it relevant for local inference users tracking llama.cpp performance updates.
An analysis of Gemma 4 QAT GGUF files reveals that Google's official 'Q4_0' releases actually employ a mixed-precision strategy. For smaller models like E2B and E4B, Google keeps critical token embeddings in Q6_K and certain projection weights in F16. This makes Google's Q4_0 files larger and more precise than Unsloth's 'Q4_K_XL' versions, which default to standard Q4_0 for almost all tensors.
A LocalLLaMA user highlighted that the newly released QAT (Quantization-Aware Training) variant of Google's Gemma-4-26B-A4B model underperforms compared to its non-QAT predecessor. Testing via llama.cpp on a chessboard SVG generation task showed significant rendering errors in the QAT version. The non-QAT GGUF version, however, produced highly accurate results under identical settings.
Google DeepMind has today officially released its latest generation of open-source model series — Gemma 4. The company positions it as "the smartest and most…