Google called it one launch. It's not.

Gemma 4 is four completely different models with different architectures, different hardware requirements, and different use cases — packaged under one name that makes it sound like a single thing. If you read the announcement and walked away confused about what to actually download, that's not on you. That's the naming.

I've been building with local AI for a while — I recently built a RAG system using Llama 3.2 running locally via Ollama, and the hardware reality of running LLMs on a regular laptop is something I've dealt with firsthand. So let me break this down practically, not theoretically.

First: What "E" and "A" Actually Mean

The naming convention is doing a lot of work here and Google doesn't explain it upfront.

E2B and E4B — the "E" stands for effective parameters. These are not 2B and 4B parameter models in the traditional sense. They use Per-Layer Embeddings (PLE) to pack more capability into fewer parameters.…