Gemma 4 vs Qwen3 Family

Gemma 4 is Google DeepMind's fourth-generation open model family, released April 2, 2026, under Apache 2.0. Four variants ship in the family: E2B and E4B edge models that run fully offline on phones, Raspberry Pi, and NVIDIA Jetson; a 26B Mixture-of-Experts model that activates only 3.8B parameters at inference; and a 31B Dense flagship. The 31B scores 1452 on the Arena AI text leaderboard (third among all open models), hits 89.2% on AIME 2026 math, and 85.2% on MMLU Pro — versus Gemma 3's 20.8% on AIME. All four model sizes accept text and image inputs. The edge models additionally handle native audio and video, making them the first on-device models with full multimodal coverage. Context windows reach 256K tokens on the large variants, enabling entire codebases or long documents in a single prompt. Native support for tool use, structured output, and agentic workflows is baked in from the start. For the open-source AI community, Gemma 4 is a watershed: a commercially permissive model that genuinely competes with closed-source alternatives on reasoning benchmarks. Gemma downloads crossed 400 million before this launch — Gemma 4's edge deployment story, combining on-device inference with frontier-class reasoning, looks set to make that number look small.

Alibaba's Qwen team released the full Qwen3 model family this week — 8 models ranging from 0.6B to 235B parameters, spanning both dense and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures. The headline model is Qwen3-235B-A22B, a 235B MoE that activates 22B parameters per token and matches GPT-4.1 on coding and math benchmarks while running at a fraction of the cost. All Qwen3 models feature switchable "thinking modes" — a built-in chain-of-thought toggle that can be enabled or disabled per request. This eliminates the need for separate reasoning vs. instruct variants, letting developers trade latency for accuracy dynamically. All models are released under Apache 2.0, with weights available on Hugging Face and ModelScope. The smaller models are competitive at their size class: Qwen3-4B reportedly matches Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct on several benchmarks, and the 0.6B model is designed to run efficiently on embedded and edge devices. The release also introduces a new multilingual benchmark covering 119 languages, on which the Qwen3 family sets new state-of-the-art scores for open-weights models.