Gemma 3 4B vs Gemma 4 31B

Gemma 3 4B, released on March 12, 2025, is the mid-sized member of Google DeepMind’s open-weight Gemma 3 family. With about 4 billion parameters, it is multimodal—supporting text and image inputs and generating text outputs. Like the larger Gemma 3 models, it features a 128,000-token input context window with an output capacity of ~8,192 tokens, enabling it to handle long documents and mixed text–image reasoning tasks.

The 4B variant is designed as a balance between efficiency and capability: it offers multilingual support across 140+ languages, strong summarization and reasoning performance, and compatibility with moderate hardware. Inference can run with ~6.4 GB VRAM in BF16, or significantly less in quantized 8-bit (~4.4 GB) or 4-bit (~3.4 GB) modes, making it accessible to developers outside large-scale infrastructure. While it lags behind the 12B and 27B versions on the most complex reasoning and multimodal benchmarks, its lower compute footprint makes it ideal for research, prototyping, and practical deployment where efficiency matters.

Gemma 4 31B is the largest dense model in Google's Gemma 4 family, built from the same research as Gemini 3 and released as open weights under the Apache 2.0 license. It supports a 256K token context window with text and image input, configurable thinking mode for step-by-step reasoning, and multilingual support across 140+ languages. The unquantized model fits on a single 80GB GPU.

For vision tasks, Gemma 4 31B supports image understanding with variable aspect ratios and resolutions, and can output structured bounding boxes for UI element detection, making it useful for document parsing and UI understanding. Compared to Gemma 3, it delivers stronger reasoning and multimodal performance. It is part of a four-size family alongside the 26B A4B MoE variant and two on-device models (E2B, E4B), with the 31B dense variant optimized for output quality and fine-tuning over inference speed.