Gemma 4: A Major Improvement Over Gemma 3 AI LLM

Gemma 3 has been around for some months. You would assume that a product from Google would have superior performance. Gemma 3 is a disappointment. It couldn't follow prompts correctly. Tests showed its reasoning capabilities were inferior to other open source AI models. But it's understandable why it was made like that. The real goal of creating the Gemma 3 models was to have an AI model that could run on any device; from mobile handsets to basic desktop & laptop machines. One major positive about the Gemma 3 models was that it was very light on system resources and its speed to respond to prompts was pretty fast. Also, it had one of the smallest models available - the 270m parameter model was a mere 292MB in size. That could handily fit into a mobile device or embedded system.

Now, Google has released a better version: Gemma 4. And its thoroughly open-source; it is licensed under the open source Apache license. After a little testing of its 4b parameter model we can now say that this model should be the recommended Gemma model. Gemma 3 still has its place since it can be used on under-powered machines without straining them. But when it comes to reasoning, Gemma 4 beats it hand down. 

Gemma 4 comes with a 'thinking' component something which Gemma 3 lacked. Thus, you could actually peek through its thought process to see how it reached a particular response. Its 'thinking' component seems to have been inspired by Qwen 3.5's since it also follows a 'checklist' while reasoning. It's 'Speed to Response' is also faster than that of DeepSeek RI and roughly similar to that of Qwen 3.5. It has the same token window as Qwen and it follows instructions better than its predecessor.

However, when it comes to resource usage it has higher usage than Gemma 3 and at the moment the smallest model - the 2b parameter model - is at 7.2GB.

All in all, if you are looking for an AI model that can handle coding, agentic workflows and multimodal understanding Gemma 4 should be your choice.