Gemma vs. Koala

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

Released alongside Vicuna, Koala is one of many descendants of the Meta LLaMA model trained on dialogue data collected from the web. On the developers' benchmarks, Koala outperforms its sibling Alpaca, though its adoption has been significantly less than that of its other sibling, Vicuna. Due to its use of LLaMA, only research use is permitted.

Initial release: 2023-04-03

Reference

https://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2023/04/03/koala/

Further Reading