---
id: "gemma-4-support"
date: "2026-04-03"
title: "Gemma 4 lands in Daneel — Google's latest open model, running locally"
summary: "Google's Gemma 4 family brings 128K context, built-in reasoning, and 35+ language support to Daneel's WebGPU and Ollama backends — running entirely on your device."
image: "/medias/gemma4.jpg"
header: "What's New"
tags: [webgpu, ollama, models, privacy]
---

Google just released Gemma 4, its most capable open model family to date. Daneel now supports it across both WebGPU (in-browser) and Ollama (local server) backends, with three model variants to choose from.

## Why Gemma 4 matters

Gemma 4 represents a significant leap from Gemma 3 on every measurable axis. The improvements are not incremental — on long-context retrieval (MRCR v2 at 128K tokens), the new family scores 66.4% where Gemma 3 managed 13.5%. On visual document understanding (OmniDocBench), edit distance drops from 0.365 to 0.131. Reasoning benchmarks follow the same trend across the board.

The practical takeaway: Gemma 4 handles longer documents, understands questions better, and reasons more carefully than its predecessor, and you can run it locally without sending a single byte to the cloud.

## What's new in the architecture

Gemma 4 introduces a hybrid attention mechanism that interleaves local sliding window attention with full global attention. This is what makes the 128K context window practical rather than theoretical: the model can actually retrieve and reason over information buried deep in long documents.

Other highlights from Google's release:

- **Built-in reasoning mode** with step-by-step thinking (similar to chain-of-thought)
- **Native function calling** for agentic workflows and tool use
- **35+ languages** supported, pre-trained on 140+
- **Per-Layer Embeddings** in smaller variants, maximizing quality per parameter for on-device deployment

## Three ways to run it in Daneel

**WebGPU — in-browser, zero setup**

Gemma 4 E2B (2.3B parameters) runs directly in your browser at q4f16 quantization, using roughly 2 GB of GPU memory. No server, no API key, no network connection required after the initial model download. Select it from Settings > Models — it appears automatically.

Requires a GPU with shader-f16 support (most GPUs from the last 3-4 years).

**Ollama E2B — local server, lightweight**

Pull `gemma4:e2b` for the same 2.3B model running on your local Ollama instance. Good for machines where WebGPU isn't available or when you want to share the model across multiple tools.

**Ollama E4B — local server, higher quality**

Pull `gemma4:e4b` for the 4.5B dense variant. Stronger reasoning and broader knowledge at the cost of roughly 4 GB VRAM. This is the sweet spot for users with 8+ GB GPUs who want the best local quality.

## How it stacks up

| Model | Params | Context | Thinking | Languages | Runs in browser |
| ----- | ------ | ------- | -------- | --------- | --------------- |
| Granite 4.0 Micro | 3B | 8K | No | English | Yes |
| Gemma 3 1B | 1B | 32K | No | Limited | Yes |
| **Gemma 4 E2B** | **2.3B** | **128K** | **Yes** | **35+** | **Yes** |
| Gemma 4 E4B | 4.5B | 128K | Yes | 35+ | No (Ollama) |

Gemma 4 E2B is now the most capable model in Daneel's WebGPU catalog: largest context window, built-in reasoning, and multilingual support — all at 2 GB.

## Leaning more about Gemma 4

- [**Gemma 4 Model Card**](https://ai.google.dev/gemma/docs/core/model_card_4)
- [**Gemma 4 On Huggingface**](https://huggingface.co/google/gemma-4-31B-it)

## What's next

Gemma 4 is natively multi-modal at the model level — it understands images and short audio alongside text. Daneel currently uses it for text tasks. Image and audio input support is on our roadmap and will unlock these capabilities in a future update.

## Getting started

Update Daneel to the latest version from the Chrome Web Store. The new models appear automatically in Settings > Models.

For Ollama users, make sure your server is up to date: `docker pull ollama/ollama:latest` (Gemma 4 requires a recent Ollama version.)

---

[Read on site](https://daneel.injen.io/news/gemma-4-support.html?utm_source=extension_news_reader&utm_medium=extension_settings&utm_campaign=extension)