Introducing Gemma 4 12B: a unified, encoder-free multimodal model

Google DeepMind released Gemma 4 12B, an open-weight model with 12 billion parameters that handles text, images, and audio in a single system and runs on a laptop with 16GB of memory. The big change is an encoder-free design that feeds raw image and audio inputs straight into the language model instead of routing them through separate encoder models. It ships under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, and the wider Gemma 4 family has passed 150 million downloads.