Gemma 4 26B A4B vs Muse Spark 1.2

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 1.2 is a proprietary multimodal reasoning model from Meta Superintelligence Labs, released as a coding-focused update to Muse Spark 1.1. It accepts text, images, video, audio, and PDF documents and returns text, with a context window of roughly one million tokens that allows whole repositories, long documents, and extended agent trajectories to be held in a single request. The model thinks before answering, and the amount of reasoning effort it spends is configurable per request. Alongside its visual and document understanding, it supports structured output and parallel function calling, and it is designed to operate either as a planning agent that delegates work or as a subagent executing tasks in parallel.

Training for version 1.2 scaled up compute on coding tasks and widened the diversity of training environments, concentrating on long-horizon work such as whole-repository generation, large end-to-end projects, and automated research. Part of the training data was self-generated, with Muse Spark 1.1 producing coding environments and instruction-following templates and grading candidate solutions against them. The model was co-trained with the Muse Code terminal agent, incorporating rejection-sampled harness trajectories and that toolset. Meta reports 82.9 percent on Terminal-Bench 2.1, an improvement of 6.7 points over Muse Spark 1.1. Multimodal use cases documented for the family include visual-to-code generation and detailed image and video captioning.