Google's new Gemma 4 12B model is designed to run on any laptop with 16GB of RAM
Google says the new model is capable of complex multistep reasoning and agentic workflows that previously required the larger Gemma variants. Despite the smaller parameter count, Gemma 4 12B comes with the newly devised Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) drafters, which 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 one 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, accepting text, audio, or images as inputs. Most gen AI models—including the other Gemma 4 variants—use dedicated encoders to process non-text inputs and pass that data to the LLM. This works well enough, but it increases latency and memory usage.
With the new mid-weight model, Google...
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