Tris Warkentin

New Capabilities

Led Gemma product strategy since inception

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