gemma

Gemma 4 12B: Google's Encoder-Free Multimodal Laptop Model

Google released Gemma 4 12B on June 3, 2026, a multimodal open model with an encoder-free architecture that feeds vision and audio directly into the LLM backbone. It runs locally on 16GB of memory, approaches the 26B MoE on benchmarks, uses Multi-Token Prediction drafters for low latency, and ships under Apache 2.0 with broad tooling support.

By Sarah Chen · 5 min · Jun 9, 2026