Hugging Face

New Capabilities

Primary distribution platform for Gemma 4

For two years, the most capable artificial intelligence models lived behind paywalls and API meters. Google made that harder to justify on April 2, 2026, when it released Gemma 4 — four open models ranging from 2 billion to 31 billion parameters, capable of handling text, images, video, and audio, under a fully permissive Apache 2.0 license with no usage restrictions. The competitive response was nearly immediate: Meta released Llama 5 just six days later, significantly ahead of its previously signaled Q3 2026 target, and Chinese lab DeepSeek followed on April 24 with its V4 model — a 1.6 trillion-parameter system also shipped as open-source under an MIT license. What began as a bilateral licensing contest between Google and Meta has become a six-way open-model race.

Updated Apr 24