Gemma vs. Phi

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

Phi is Microsoft's family of compact open models designed for efficient local and edge deployment. Phi-4 is the current generation.

Microsoft introduced Phi-1 and Phi-2 to demonstrate how carefully curated and synthetic training data can make small models unusually capable. Phi-3 expanded the family for mobile and multimodal use. The Phi-4 generation includes a 14B general model and reasoning variants, plus smaller and multimodal checkpoints. Phi models are released under the MIT license and are designed for research, local inference, and resource-constrained production workloads.

Initial release: 2023-06-20

Current generation: Phi-4

Reference

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/phi

Further Reading

• https://huggingface.co/microsoft/phi-2
• https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.11644
• https://huggingface.co/microsoft/phi-4