Google’s Gemma 4 finally made me care about running local LLMs

We’ve reached a point where every company is releasing AI models so incredibly fast that they’ve started blurring together. New name, bigger benchmark numbers, the same “our most capable model yet” marketing language. OpenAI drops something new, then Google responds, then Anthropic fires back, and we go on and go on.

I test AI tools for a living, and while the numbers might matter to me, I know far too well that the average person doesn’t care whether a model scored 3% higher on some reasoning benchmark. Local LLMs are something I don’t talk about all that much, because it admittedly took me embarrassingly long to actually see their potential. The ones I tested initially were slow and clunky, and as someone who has always had a first-impression problem, I wrote them off mentally. That said, Google finally launched a model that pulled me back in and it’s actually worth running.

Google launched four new open-source models

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