Gemma 4 and what makes an open model succeed
Hint: it's not benchmark scores.
Having written a lot of model release blog posts, there’s something much harder about reviewing open models when they drop relative to closed models, especially in 2026. In recent years, there were so few open models, so when Llama 3 was released most people were still doing research on Llama 2 and super happy to get an ...
The article presents an analysis of Gemma 4, Google's latest open-source AI model. The authors discuss its potential for widespread adoption due to the improved Apache 2.0 license, but also acknowledge concerns about previous issues with tooling and fine-tuning performance. The authors compare Gemma 4 to Qwen 3.5 in terms of benchmark scores, highlighting their competitiveness within the same class. Additionally, the article mentions ongoing efforts to improve the open AI ecosystem, such as The ...