I dunno, feels a bit unfair to companies that actually do FOSS releases (Gemma 4 being released under Apache 2.0 license) to compare them to a company that never done any FOSS releases, and mostly done proprietary "available to download" releases.
Agreed, miles ahead though from "proprietary" which is what Meta been using for most model releases.
Ideally companies would share the fucking datasets and training code already, but no, no one wants to talk about the source of those or even share the ones they have as then who knows what comes out of Pandora's box...
IDK this model release is a bit disappointing considering the community has been chomping at the bit for the 124ba4b model. There was some leaked info about it but people suspect it was not released because it was too close to gemini flash in performance.
Every other Google model I have tried felt very weak compared to qwen models. I dont have a ton of use case for multimodal though, so its very possible this is a fantastic multimodal model.
Hard disagree, Qwen multimodal is way better than google's, but Gemma 31b runs laps around Qwen 27B in complex engineering tasks. Maybe Qwen is better at slopcoding web framework CRUD, but for embedded dev there's no comparison.
E4B is decent at instruction following. It managed to produce a deliverable on par with the lowest tier of paid models. Even higher tiers often just ignore all rules when they feel like it.
I wish it was an 8BA1B MoE model with the newer acceleration 1B or maybe even a tailor-made sub-1B slapped on top. That would make it an awesome local model for the average laptop.