Run Gemma 4 on Your Laptop: A Hands-On Guide to Google's Latest Open Multimodal LLM

Google's Gemma 4, released April 2, 2026, is a locally-runnable open-weight AI model that handles text, images, video, and audio — all under a clean Apache 2.0 license. Using a free tool called Ollama, you can download and run it on a 16GB laptop in minutes. The E4B model (~9.6GB) hits a sweet spot between performance and hardware demands, while a 26B Mixture-of-Experts variant delivers higher-quality responses by only activating 4B parameters at a time.