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Do Gemma 4 models compete with Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite? I would assume even the smallest Gemini model would outperform even Gemma 4 31B, but I can't really get a sense of performance or output quality difference.

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Gemma 4 31b outperformed Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite in our app benchmarks (agentic tool use via api in our application as a part of various workflows). But google won't let you pay to use Gemma models, you have to go elsewhere, I think this may be because it would cannabilize Flash-lite.

You can actually get the gemma-4 models on a per-token API basis, you just have to click some extra buttons (in GCP). Not the same for other open weight models. For those they make you run your own hardware.

Use OpenCode Go instead: https://opencode.ai/go

That doesn't have the Gemma models by the looks

They only host models they have evaluated and found good at coding

Curious logic. Does Google want you to use it or not? Do they want to be paid for tokens or not? why segregate open and closed?

It's not parameter size - there is apparently such a thing as "Gemini Nano", which famously is downloaded automatically by Chrome. How similar is it to Gemma E4B? And how strange - you have the weights, but you don't "have" them?

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