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LLM Index

Gemma vs. Orca

A side-by-side comparison of release history, capabilities, licensing and model sizes.

Attribute Gemma Orca
Developer Google Microsoft
Current generation Gemma 4 –
Initial release 2024-02-21 2023-06-05
Instruct tuned Yes Yes
Coding Yes No
Finetuning Yes Yes
Open source Yes Yes
License Apache 2.0 Noncommercial
Model sizes E2B, E4B, 12B, 26B (3.8B active), 31B 13B
Links
Website
Website

Gemma

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.

Further reading

Orca

Orca is a descendant of LLaMA developed by Microsoft with finetuning on explanation traces obtained from GPT-4.

Orca-13B is a LLM developed by Microsoft. It is based on LLaMA with finetuning on complex explanation traces obtained from GPT-4. By using rich signals, Orca surpasses the performance of models such as Vicuna-13B on complex tasks. However, given its model backbone and the data used for its finetuning, Orca is under noncommercial use.

Further reading

Compare other models

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