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title: Muse Glimmer 30B Architecture Notes | daily.dev
description: Meta released Muse Glimmer 30B, a 30B multimodal reasoning model with a Gemma-like architecture. Key architectural highlights include a 131k context window,...
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og:description: Meta released Muse Glimmer 30B, a 30B multimodal reasoning model with a Gemma-like architecture. Key architectural highlights include a 131k context window,...
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# Muse Glimmer 30B Architecture Notes

**[Sebastian Raschka](https://daily.dev/sources/sebastianraschka)** · 3 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

Meta released Muse Glimmer 30B, a 30B multimodal reasoning model with a Gemma-like architecture. Key architectural highlights include a 131k context window, dense (non-MoE) design, hybrid attention with a 3:1 SWA:GQA ratio, gated attention for both attention types, and an extreme GQA ratio of 32 query heads to just 2 KV heads. This results in an exceptionally small KV cache of 52 KiB per token in BF16 — far smaller than Qwen3.6 27B (64 KiB) or Gemma 4 31B (840 KiB). Benchmark performance is roughly on par with Qwen3.6, with Meta's own benchmarks showing it slightly ahead and independent benchmarks slightly behind. The model is particularly well-suited for agentic workflows due to its low memory footprint and fast prefill/decode speed. Muse Spark, the more capable model it was distilled from, remains API-only.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://sebastianraschka.com/blog/2026/muse-glimmer-30b-architecture-notes.html>

## Questions this post answers

### What is the KV cache size per token for Meta Muse Glimmer 30B compared to Qwen3.6 27B and Gemma 4 31B?

Muse Glimmer 30B has a KV cache of 52 KiB per token in BF16, compared to 64 KiB for Qwen3.6 27B and 840 KiB for Gemma 4 31B. This extreme efficiency comes from its 32 query heads to just 2 KV heads GQA ratio, making it particularly memory-efficient for long-context and agentic workloads.

_Engineers choosing models for memory-constrained agentic deployments track comparisons like this on daily.dev._

### What is the SWA to GQA ratio in Meta Muse Glimmer 30B and how does it compare to Gemma 4?

Muse Glimmer 30B uses a 3:1 local-to-global (SWA:GQA) ratio in its hybrid attention design. Gemma 4 uses a 5:1 ratio for comparison. Glimmer also applies gated attention — a sigmoid gate on the attention output — to both its SWA and GQA layers, which has become increasingly common in recent model releases.

_Researchers tracking LLM architectural trends across model releases find those discussions on daily.dev._

## Similar posts on daily.dev

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---

Tags: [#ai-inference](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-inference), [#deep-learning](https://daily.dev/tags/deep-learning), [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/muse-glimmer-30b-architecture-notes-dkdmm5p34)

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