Gemma vs. OPT

Overview

Gemma is Google's family of efficient open models for local, edge, and self-hosted deployment. Gemma 4 is the current generation, spanning mobile-scale through workstation-scale models.

Google introduced Gemma in February 2024 as a family of lightweight open models built from the same research used for Gemini. Gemma 2 improved efficiency and model quality, while Gemma 3 added multimodal input and longer context. Gemma 4, released in April 2026 under Apache 2.0, adds advanced reasoning, agentic tool use, code generation, image and video understanding, and models ranging from edge-focused E2B and E4B variants to 12B, 26B mixture-of-experts, and 31B dense checkpoints.

Initial release: 2024-02-21

Current generation: Gemma 4

Reference

https://ai.google.dev/gemma

Further Reading

• https://ai.google.dev/gemma/docs
• https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-tools/gemma-4/

Overview

Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models (OPT) is part of the family of open source models designed to replicate GPT-3, with similar decoder-only architecture. It has since been superseded by models such as LLaMA, GPT-J, and Pythia.

Initial release: 2022-05-03

Reference

https://github.com/facebookresearch/metaseq/tree/main/projects/OPT

Further Reading