Models › gemma family

gemma-3n-E4B-it-litert-lm

google Gemma Terms of Use out 17 months ago

Text in, text out.

Verified 2026-10-25 Rank #702 in LLMs · score 72 method v1 Sources 3 Downloads 30d 1.7k · #583 of 619 tracked

Can I use it?Gemma Terms of UseGoogle's terms + prohibited-use policy; must pass terms downstreamlicence file2026-10-24
Do people use it?1.7kdownloads, 30 days#583 of 619 we track · below the median+2 likes, downloads +0% this week582 likesHugging Face2026-10-24

Worth reading

Picked by rule from 21 tracked pieces: the lab's own post, the most shared, a field report, the latest.

Most discussed · 919 HN pts

Show HN: Open-source engine running Gemma 4 26B in 2 GB RAM on any M-series Mac

TurboFieldfare enables Gemma 4 26B-A4B inference on Apple Silicon Macs with only 8 GB of RAM by streaming experts from the SSD instead of loading the full model.

  • The installer never materializes the full source checkpoint and streams required byte ranges directly into the .gturbo layout.
  • The loopback server has no remote authentication or TLS and the client must authorize and run every tool call.
github.com 2026-07-29 919 HN pts · 342 comments 2.4k words about the gemma family family
Latest · 3 months ago

Running Gemma 4 26B at 5 tokens/sec on a 13-year-old Xeon with no GPU

Engineers can run Google's Gemma 4 26B-A4B model on a 13-year-old dual Xeon E5-2690 v2 server without a GPU by using the ik_llama.cpp fork with GGML_USE_IQK_MULMAT disabled.

  • The graph builder emits MOE_FUSED_UP_GATE and FUSED_UP_GATE ops unconditionally even when AVX2 instructions are unavailable.
  • Disabling --run-time-repack is mandatory because it reorders weights into an AVX2-only layout that garbles output on AVX1 hardware.
neomindlabs.com 2026-07-15 329 HN pts · 212 comments 1.9k words about the gemma family family

21 best of 21 tracked

The 2 picks above, plus these 19. Top is the radar's score: discussion, source authority and the lab's own posts, fading with age.

  1. ArticleGemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal modelblog.google · 2026-06-03 · 1,062 HN pts · official
  2. ArticleGemma 4 QAT models: Optimizing compression for mobile and laptop efficiencyblog.google · 2026-06-05 · 406 HN pts · official
  3. ArticleAccelerating Gemma 4: faster inference with multi-token prediction draftersblog.google · 2026-05-05 · 687 HN pts · official
  4. ArticleGoogle releases Gemma 4 open modelsdeepmind.google · 2026-04-02 · 1,812 HN pts · official
  5. ArticleGemma 4 on iPhoneapps.apple.com · 2026-04-05 · 868 HN pts
  6. ArticleGoogle Gemma 4 Runs Natively on iPhone with Full Offline AI Inferencegizmoweek.com · 2026-04-15 · 303 HN pts
  7. CodeApril 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac minigist.github.com · 2026-04-03 · 330 HN pts
  8. ArticleI ran Gemma 4 as a local model in Codex CLIblog.danielvaughan.com · 2026-04-12 · 285 HN pts
  9. ArticleRunning Gemma 4 locally with LM Studio's new headless CLI and Claude Codeai.georgeliu.com · 2026-04-05
  10. CodeShow HN: Gemma 4 Multimodal Fine-Tuner for Apple Silicongithub.com · 2026-04-07
  11. ArticleGemma: New Open Modelsblog.google · 2024-02-21 · official
  12. ArticleGemma 3 270M: Compact model for hyper-efficient AIdevelopers.googleblog.com · 2025-08-14 · official
  13. ArticleGemma 3 QAT Models: Bringing AI to Consumer GPUsdevelopers.googleblog.com · 2025-04-20 · official
  14. ArticleA Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathwayblog.google · 2025-10-15 · official
  15. ArticleGemma3 Function Callingai.google.dev · 2025-03-23 · official
  16. ArticleFine-tune Google's Gemma 3unsloth.ai · 2025-03-19
  17. CodeGemma.cpp: lightweight, standalone C++ inference engine for Gemma modelsgithub.com · 2024-02-23
  18. CodeGemma 3 270M re-implemented in pure PyTorch for local tinkeringgithub.com · 2025-08-20
  19. ArticleGemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size [pdf]storage.googleapis.com · 2024-06-27

Where it's used

Hugging Face does not say who downloads a model or with what. These are the proxies: API providers listing it, quantized builds, fine-tunes/adapters/merges, and Spaces that load it.

No API provider serves it, so its downloads are people running it themselves: 8 Spaces.

  • As a service0no API provider listed
  • On own hardware0quantized builds
  • Built on44 fine-tunes · 0 adapters · 0 merges
  • In apps8Hugging Face Spaces

Top Spaces running it: tylermullen/Gemma3 ♥ 16 · tylermullen/Gemma3n ♥ 10 · jt5d/Gemma3n ♥ 1

The story so far

Weights, every dated article, and repo commits on one rail.

10 dated articles and 18 repo commits so far

Teal is the weights (2025-06-06), amber triangles are 10 dated articles (each links to it), grey ticks are repo commits.

What people built on it

4 derivatives on the Hub. Which build to run, by runtime: the most downloaded in each class.

4 derivatives on the Hub, most of them fine-tunes

From the Hugging Face model tree; quantized builds in teal, fine-tunes, merges and adapters in greys.

4 fine-tunes (Hugging Face model tree)4 fine-tunes
4 fine-tunes (Hugging Face model tree)4 fine-tunes

All variants →

Reference

Everything else, folded: the full tables, every source.

Benchmarks

11 rows

Benchmarks 11 rows

measured third-party leaderboard rowauthor-reported number from the model card or eval files (11)No confidence intervals unless the source gave them; settings differ between rows, so compare within a benchmark, not across. Date = the benchmark's own date when it gives one, else when we read it.
BenchmarkValueSetting / notesReported byDate
author-reported ARC Challenge · Chat and follow instructions61.6 percentE4B PTmodel author2026-10-07
author-reported BBH · Reason through hard problems52.9 percentE4B PTmodel author2026-10-07
author-reported Commonsense QA sets · Chat and follow instructions81.6 percentE4B PTmodel author2026-10-07
author-reported Commonsense QA sets · Chat and follow instructions81 percentE4B PTmodel author2026-10-07
author-reported Commonsense QA sets · Chat and follow instructions50 percentE4B PTmodel author2026-10-07
author-reported Commonsense QA sets · Chat and follow instructions70.2 percentE4B PTmodel author2026-10-07
author-reported Commonsense QA sets · Chat and follow instructions20.9 percentE4B PTmodel author2026-10-07
author-reported Commonsense QA sets · Chat and follow instructions81.6 percentE4B PTmodel author2026-10-07
author-reported DROP60.8E4B PTmodel author2026-10-07
author-reported HellaSwag · Chat and follow instructions78.6 percentE4B PTmodel author2026-10-07
author-reported Winogrande · Chat and follow instructions71.7 percentE4B PTmodel author2026-10-07

What the card says

3 cited sentences

Summary generated, cited

Gemma 3n E4B-it-litert-lm is a text-generation model from Google that supports multimodal inputs including text, vision, and audio.[1] The model uses a Matformer architecture and operates with an effective size of 4B parameters.[2][3] It is released under the Gemma Terms of Use and can process a total input context of 32K tokens.[4][5]

  1. “support multimodal inputs, including text, vision, and audio”
  2. “Matformer architecture that allows nesting multiple models”
  3. “effective size of 2B and 4B parameters”
  4. license
  5. “Total input context of 32K tokens”

Generated 2026-10-07 15:12 UTC by parasail-gemma-4-26b-a4b-it; each numeral points at the fact it rests on. Not a verdict.

Use-case evidence

4 use cases

What it is good at 4 use cases

Labels are evidence, not verdicts: measured a third-party leaderboard row for this model; author-reported a number the model author published in the card or eval files; structural a deterministic signal from the name, config or chat template, or a decision-model estimate. Each chip links to its source. All use cases.

Facts

12 fields

Listed in LLMs

Facts

  • License: Gemma Terms of Use (friction: attribution). Google's terms + prohibited-use policy; must pass terms downstream. (license file, observed 2026-10-24)
  • Created 2025-06-06, last modified 2025-11-25. (HF API, observed 2026-10-24)
  • Access is gated on Hugging Face (manual). (HF API, observed 2026-10-24)

All variants

4 variants

Lineage

Original model Family: google/gemma 4 derivatives on the Hub

finetune: 4

Top variants (4 shown, ranked by downloads)

4 rows
Variant Relation Quant Params Band License Author Likes Downloads
nmrenyi/gemma-3n-E4B-it-litert-lm finetune — — — gemma nmrenyi 1 223
notabilia/gemma-3n-E4B-it-litert-lm finetune — — — gemma notabilia 1 0
droiden/gemma-3n-E4B-it-litert-lm finetune — — — gemma droiden 0 0
asqrzk/CombsEdge_4B_IT_Multimodel_base finetune — — — mit asqrzk 0 0

Repository changelog

18 commits

Repository changelog 18 commits

DateCommitSHA
2025-11-25 Upload gemma-3n-E4B-it-int4.litertlm 297ed75
2025-09-30 Update web model (#6) 223845a
2025-09-02 Update README.md 8f59ca0
2025-08-28 Update README.md 9b2c8ab
2025-08-26 Update README.md fc7c42d
2025-08-26 Upload gemma-3n-E4B-it-int4-Web.litertlm 37ba4e9
2025-08-18 Update README.md 8cded76
2025-08-18 Update README.md 372e502
2025-08-18 Update README.md e9aac85
2025-08-15 Update README.md aff5db5
2025-08-15 Update README.md c31d55a
2025-08-15 Update README.md adf80b2
2025-08-15 Upload gemma-3n-E4B-it-int4.litertlm 3d0179a
2025-06-10 Update README.md 32ae948
2025-06-10 Update README.md a75d8e0
2025-06-10 Update README.md 74709dc
2025-06-06 Upload gemma-3n-E4B-it-int4.litertlm f4f1705
2025-06-06 initial commit f61d783

Articles and coverage

21 pieces

Ranked by source signals (HN, Lobsters, authority domains, official posts) and recency. Summaries are generated from a stored copy of the article text; every sentence cites a span of that text, and nothing is shown that failed the citation check.

Official4

blog.google2026-06-03officialauthorityHN front pageabout the gemma familyHN 1,062 pts · 401 comments584 words
Google releases Gemma 4 12B, an Apache 2.0 licensed model that has crossed 150 million downloads and runs locally on hardware with 16GB of VRAM or unified memory. The encoder-free architecture integrates raw audio signals and vision inputs directly into the LLM backbone, eliminating separate encoders to reduce latency and memory usage. It includes Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) drafters to reduce inference latency while delivering reasoning performance nearing the 26B Mixture of Experts model.written, reviewed, cited
blog.google2026-06-05officialauthorityHN front pageabout the gemma familyHN 406 pts · 130 comments714 words
Google released new Gemma 4 checkpoints optimized with Quantization-Aware Training to improve efficiency on edge devices and consumer GPUs. The E2B model achieves a 1GB memory footprint using a mobile-specialized schema that applies targeted 2-bit quantization to token generation layers. Developers can access GGUF formats ready for llama.cpp and MTP QAT checkpoints to preserve inference speedups while running locally.written, reviewed, cited
  • The mobile-specialized schema pre-calculates activation scaling settings during training to reduce workload on mobile chips.
  • Targeted 2-bit quantization compresses token generation parts while keeping core reasoning layers at higher precision.
  • Deploying only needed modalities allows the Gemma 4 E2B text-only model to require less than 1 GB of memory.
blog.google2026-05-05officialauthorityHN front pageabout the gemma familyHN 687 pts · 330 comments796 words
Google released Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) drafters for the Gemma 4 family under the same open-source Apache 2.0 license as Gemma 4. These drafters deliver up to a 3x speedup for models like the 26B MoE and 31B Dense versions without quality degradation. Benchmarks on hardware such as the NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 show that increasing batch sizes to 4 to 8 unlocks up to a ~2.2x speedup locally.written, reviewed, cited
  • The MTP drafter shares the target model's KV cache to avoid recalculating context the larger model has already processed.
  • For E2B and E4B edge models, an efficient clustering technique in the embedder accelerates generation where logit calculation is a bottleneck.
  • The 26B mixture-of-experts model presents unique routing challenges at a batch size of 1 on Apple Silicon.
deepmind.google2026-04-02officialauthorityHN front pageabout the gemma familyHN 1,812 pts · 474 comments253 words

Analysis6

github.com2026-07-29authorityHN front pageabout the gemma familyHN 919 pts · 342 comments2,408 words
TurboFieldfare enables Gemma 4 26B-A4B inference on Apple Silicon Macs with only 8 GB of RAM by streaming experts from the SSD instead of loading the full model. The runtime maintains ~2 GB of weights and a 4K KV cache in memory, achieving 5.1-6.3 tok/s on an 8 GB M2 MacBook Air and 31-35 tok/s on a 24 GB M5 Pro. The complete installation occupies about 14.3 GB for the text model plus optional image packs.written, reviewed, cited
  • The installer never materializes the full source checkpoint and streams required byte ranges directly into the .gturbo layout.
  • The loopback server has no remote authentication or TLS and the client must authorize and run every tool call.
  • The image tower requires an M2 or newer Apple Silicon Mac while text-only inference remains available on M1.
neomindlabs.com2026-07-15HN front pageabout the gemma familyHN 329 pts · 212 comments1,937 words
Engineers can run Google's Gemma 4 26B-A4B model on a 13-year-old dual Xeon E5-2690 v2 server without a GPU by using the ik_llama.cpp fork with GGML_USE_IQK_MULMAT disabled. The system achieves approximately 5.2 tokens per second for decoding and 16 tokens per second for prompt evaluation when quantized to Q8_0. This repurposed HP StoreVirtual box costs under $300 and operates using only AVX1 instruction sets.written, reviewed, cited
  • The graph builder emits MOE_FUSED_UP_GATE and FUSED_UP_GATE ops unconditionally even when AVX2 instructions are unavailable.
  • Disabling --run-time-repack is mandatory because it reorders weights into an AVX2-only layout that garbles output on AVX1 hardware.
  • The fix splits combined up_gate_exps tensors into two separate slices to run distinct mul-mat-IDs instead of relying on fused kernels.
apps.apple.com2026-04-05HN front pageabout the gemma familyHN 868 pts · 234 comments
gizmoweek.com2026-04-15HN front pageabout the gemma familyHN 303 pts · 187 comments364 words
gist.github.com2026-04-03authorityHN front pageabout the gemma familyHN 330 pts · 123 comments759 words
blog.danielvaughan.com2026-04-12HN front pageabout the gemma familyHN 285 pts · 116 comments
All coverage tracked for this model (21) — append-only, nothing is ever removed
TitleSourcePublishedFirst seenSignals
Show HN: Open-source engine running Gemma 4 26B in 2 GB RAM on any M-series Macgithub.com2026-07-292026-10-07hn
Running Gemma 4 26B at 5 tokens/sec on a 13-year-old Xeon with no GPUneomindlabs.com2026-07-152026-10-07hn
Gemma 4 QAT models: Optimizing compression for mobile and laptop efficiencyblog.google official2026-06-052026-10-07hn
Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal modelblog.google official2026-06-032026-10-07hn
Accelerating Gemma 4: faster inference with multi-token prediction draftersblog.google official2026-05-052026-10-07hn
Google Gemma 4 Runs Natively on iPhone with Full Offline AI Inferencegizmoweek.com2026-04-152026-10-07hn
I ran Gemma 4 as a local model in Codex CLIblog.danielvaughan.com2026-04-122026-10-07hn
Show HN: Gemma 4 Multimodal Fine-Tuner for Apple Silicongithub.com2026-04-072026-10-07hn
Gemma 4 on iPhoneapps.apple.com2026-04-052026-10-07hn
Running Gemma 4 locally with LM Studio's new headless CLI and Claude Codeai.georgeliu.com2026-04-052026-10-07hn
April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac minigist.github.com2026-04-032026-10-07hn
Google releases Gemma 4 open modelsdeepmind.google official2026-04-022026-10-07hn
A Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathwayblog.google official2025-10-152026-10-07hn
Gemma 3 270M re-implemented in pure PyTorch for local tinkeringgithub.com2025-08-202026-10-07hn
Gemma 3 270M: Compact model for hyper-efficient AIdevelopers.googleblog.com official2025-08-142026-10-07hn
Gemma 3 QAT Models: Bringing AI to Consumer GPUsdevelopers.googleblog.com official2025-04-202026-10-07hn
Gemma3 Function Callingai.google.dev official2025-03-232026-10-07hn
Fine-tune Google's Gemma 3unsloth.ai2025-03-192026-10-07hn
Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size [pdf]storage.googleapis.com2024-06-272026-10-07hn
Gemma.cpp: lightweight, standalone C++ inference engine for Gemma modelsgithub.com2024-02-232026-10-07hn
Gemma: New Open Modelsblog.google official2024-02-212026-10-07hn

Papers

8 papers

Papers 8

arXiv links found in the model card and its tags. "Peer-reviewed" is shown only with evidence: a published venue in OpenAlex (measured) or the authors' own journal reference on arXiv (reported).

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Sources

3 sources

Sources

Hub snapshot: 2026-10-25 · HF API: 2026-10-24 21:40 UTC · Providers: 2026-10-24 21:44 UTC · Articles: 2026-10-24 21:46 UTC · Summary: 2026-10-07 15:12 UTC · Last verified 2026-10-25

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