Gemma 4: The Local LLM That's Actually Worth Running (And Where It Falls Short)

Gemma 4 shipped on April 2, 2026, and the marketing copy is doing what marketing copy does: making you think you've solved the local LLM problem. You haven't. But Gemma 4 is closer than anything else in open-source right now—and that's worth understanding. Let me be direct: if you're deciding whether to run Gemma 4 locally instead of calling Claude or GPT-4o's API, the answer is "it depends," and the dependencies are harder than Google's spec sheet suggests. The Real Pitch (Not the Marketing One