Gemma 4 12B: Google's encoder-free multimodal AI now runs on a laptop (opens in new tab)

Google shipped Gemma 4 12B this week — a model that packs near-26B performance into something that runs on a consumer laptop with 16GB of RAM or unified memory. That alone would be notable. But the more significant move is the architecture: no multimodal encoders at all. Vision and audio go straight into the LLM backbone. "Gemma 4 12B packages powerful capabilities inside a reduced memory footprint. It is also our first mid-sized model to feature native audio inputs." — Google DeepMind What a...