Gemma 4 Model Release (via)
Really impressive model release here from Google. I tested it out on a few Calculus math problems (enough to make it think without being crazy difficult) and was really impressed with the reasoning traces it churned through. It reasons with the correctness and confidence of a much larger model (probably because that’s what it was distilled from).
I had gotten used to the style of the Qwen models, where it feels like they were cold started on distillations from larger models (probably Anthropic’s) and then RL’d on top of that. Qwen thinking traces start off very organized and confident–often with a telltale sign of a distillation like “Here’s a chain of thought reasoning outline to solve this problem”–would get close to the conclusion, and go totally off the rails and have a mental breakdown second guessing everything.
Gemma 4 so far has exhibited none of those signs and reads much closer to a large model like Opus: state the problem, go through the steps, and state the conclusion before outputting the response to the user.