Google just filled the most important gap in its open-model lineup. Gemma 4 12B is now available in LM Studio, and it's the first mid-sized model in the Gemma family to natively handle text, images, audio, and video , all in a single decoder-only transformer, no separate encoders required. The kicker: it runs on a standard 16GB laptop.
The gap it fills
The original Gemma 4 family, released in April, held four models: two tuned for phones (E2B and E4B) and two built for heavier work (a 26B Mixture of Experts and a 31B Dense). A wide gap sat in the middle , and the new 12-billion-parameter model drops right into it.
Gemma 4 12B delivers performance nearing the larger 26B MoE model on standard benchmarks, but at less than half the total memory footprint. Google says it clearly beats the older Gemma 3 27B across tests like GPQA Diamond, MMLU Pro, and DocVQA. Concretely, Gemma 4 12B scores 77.2% on MMLU Pro, beating last year's Gemma 3 27B (67.6%).
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