Gemma 4 26B A4B vs Muse Spark 1.1

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 Spark 1.1 is a natively multimodal reasoning model from Meta Superintelligence Labs, released on July 9, 2026, as a significant upgrade to the original Muse Spark. The model accepts text, image, video, PDF, and audio as input and produces text output. It operates with a 1-million-token context window (1,048,576 tokens per the Meta Model API documentation) and is designed specifically for agentic tasks that require planning, tool use, computer use, and multi-agent orchestration. The model runs in a "Thinking" mode, where adjustable reasoning effort is applied before generating a response. It can function both as a main agent gathering context, forming plans, and delegating to parallel subagents and as a subagent that adheres to assigned tasks and escalates when needed. It is trained to decide autonomously when to write automation scripts versus interact directly with a user interface.

Muse Spark 1.1 supports a range of multimodal capabilities including visual perception, image and video captioning, visual-to-code generation, and document analysis. The model was evaluated under Meta's Advanced AI Scaling Framework across frontier risk categories including chemical and biological threats, cybersecurity, and loss-of-control scenarios. Parameter count, architecture details, and training data composition are not publicly disclosed. The model is proprietary and closed-weight, accessible to consumers through the Meta AI app and to developers via the Meta Model API, which launched in public preview alongside this release.