Gemma 4 26B A4B vs Muse Ember

Gemma 4 26B A4B is the Mixture-of-Experts variant in Google's Gemma 4 family, with 25.2B total parameters but only 3.8B active per token. Built from the same Gemini 3 research as the 31B dense sibling and released as open weights under the Apache 2.0 license, it supports a 256K token context window with text and image input and configurable thinking mode. The "A4B" in the name refers to its approximately 4B active parameters. The MoE design makes it significantly faster at inference than the dense 31B, running nearly as fast as a 4B-parameter model while delivering roughly 97% of the dense model's quality.

For vision tasks, the 26B A4B shares the same multimodal capabilities as the 31B image understanding with variable aspect ratios and resolutions, and structured bounding box output for UI element detection. The tradeoff versus the 31B dense model is a small quality reduction in exchange for much faster inference and lower hardware requirements, fitting in 18GB of VRAM at 4-bit quantization. It ranked #6 among open models on the Arena AI text leaderboard at launch.

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.