--- title: "Introducing Gemma 4 12B: a unified, encoder-free multimodal model" url: https://daily.dev/posts/introducing-gemma-4-12b-a-unified-encoder-free-multimodal-model-0nl4pti8o source_url: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-tools/introducing-gemma-4-12b type: article source: "DeepMind" published: 2026-07-21T16:31:39.170Z updated: 2026-07-29T15:43:28.810Z tags: ["google", "llm", "multimodal", "gemma"] reading_time: 3 upvotes: 8 comments: 0 language: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Introducing Gemma 4 12B: a unified, encoder-free multimodal model **[DeepMind](https://daily.dev/sources/dm)** · 3 min read · 8 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Google has released Gemma 4 12B, a mid-sized multimodal model designed to run locally on consumer laptops with 16GB of VRAM. Its standout feature is an encoder-free architecture that processes vision and audio inputs directly through the LLM backbone — replacing traditional separate encoders with lightweight embedding modules. The model bridges the gap between the smaller E4B and the larger 26B MoE model, offering near-26B benchmark performance at under half the memory footprint. It supports native audio input (a first for mid-sized Gemma models), Multi-Token Prediction drafters for lower latency, and is released under Apache 2.0. Developers can run it via Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp, MLX, vLLM, or deploy on Google Cloud. Gemma 4 models have now crossed 150 million downloads. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Gemma 4 12B Enables On-Device, Multimodal Agentic Workflows with an Encoder-free Architecture](https://daily.dev/posts/gemma-4-12b-enables-on-device-multimodal-agentic-workflows-with-an-encoder-free-architecture-wieojqluc) · InfoQ · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#google](https://daily.dev/tags/google), [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm), [#multimodal](https://daily.dev/tags/multimodal), [#gemma](https://daily.dev/tags/gemma) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/introducing-gemma-4-12b-a-unified-encoder-free-multimodal-model-0nl4pti8o)