Gemma 3 4B vs Muse Ember

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.

Muse Ember is a proprietary multimodal reasoning model from Meta, released on November 9, 2026. It accepts text, images, video, audio, and PDF documents and returns text. The Meta Model API serves it as muse-ember-1.0, with a 1,048,576-token context window and up to 524,288 output tokens. Reasoning effort is adjustable from minimal to max.

Meta positions Ember for repeated tasks within larger agent workflows: tool calls, routing, coding subtasks, and processing collections of images and documents. It can caption or sort photos and extract fields from records while a larger Muse model handles planning. Meta recommends Spark or Wonder for harder single-shot coding and knowledge-heavy problems. Ember is available as a hosted model; its weights are not publicly released.