What is Gemma 3n?
Gemma 3n, the next evolution of our lightweight AI models, specifically engineered to bring powerful multimodal capabilities directly to edge devices. Designed for developers, Gemma 3n overcomes the limitations of on-device processing, enabling high-performance AI applications previously confined to the cloud.
Key Features
Leveraging innovative architecture and optimization techniques, Gemma 3n empowers you to build sophisticated AI experiences on constrained hardware:
🧠 Optimized for Edge Performance: Engineered with efficiency as a core principle, Gemma 3n models are available in E2B and E4B sizes. While their raw parameter counts are 5B and 8B respectively, architectural innovations like Per-Layer Embeddings (PLE) allow them to run with memory footprints comparable to traditional 2B (2GB) and 4B (3GB) models, fitting within typical device memory limits.
👁️👂 Native Multimodal by Design: Gemma 3n natively supports image, audio, video, and text inputs, generating text outputs. This integrated approach, featuring new audio (USM-based) and vision (MobileNet-V5) encoders optimized specifically for on-device use cases, enables rich, interactive applications that understand multiple data types simultaneously.
🪆 Flexible Architecture (MatFormer): At its heart, Gemma 3n features the novel MatFormer architecture. This allows for elastic inference, enabling you to directly use pre-extracted E2B models for faster inference or create custom-sized models between E2B and E4B for precise tuning to hardware constraints using the Mix-n-Match method.
✨ Enhanced Quality & Capabilities: Benefit from significant quality improvements across multilinguality (supporting 140 languages for text and multimodal understanding of 35 languages), math, coding, and reasoning. The E4B version achieves an LMArena score over 1300, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance for models under 10 billion parameters.
⚡ Accelerated Long-Context Processing (KV Cache Sharing): Designed to handle lengthy inputs like audio and video streams efficiently, KV Cache Sharing significantly improves time-to-first-token, delivering up to a 2x improvement on prefill performance compared to previous models.
How Gemma 3n Solves Your Problems
Gemma 3n provides the tools developers need to build advanced AI applications directly on edge devices:
Deploy Powerful AI on Constrained Hardware: Overcome memory and processing limitations. Gemma 3n's optimized architecture and low memory footprint allow you to run high-capability multimodal models on devices with limited RAM and processing power, enabling offline functionality and reduced latency.
Build Real-time Multimodal Applications: Create applications that understand and react to the user's environment in real-time. Leverage the integrated, highly efficient audio and vision encoders to process spoken commands, analyze live video (up to 60fps on devices like Google Pixel), or interpret images simultaneously with text input.
Develop Flexible & High-Quality Edge Solutions: Utilize the MatFormer architecture to select or create model sizes that precisely match your hardware and performance needs. Benefit from enhanced accuracy and versatility across language, coding, and reasoning tasks directly on the device.
Why Choose Gemma 3n?
Gemma 3n stands out by offering a unique combination of capabilities specifically tailored for the edge:
True Edge-Native Multimodality: Unlike many models adapted for multimodal tasks, Gemma 3n is built from the ground up with highly optimized audio and vision encoders designed for efficiency and performance on edge hardware.
Architectural Innovation for Efficiency: Novel components like MatFormer and Per-Layer Embeddings deliver state-of-the-art capabilities while keeping memory requirements significantly lower than traditional models of comparable size.
Broad Ecosystem & Tool Support: Designed for the developer community, Gemma 3n offers extensive support across popular tools and frameworks from day one, facilitating easy integration into your existing development workflows.
Conclusion
Gemma 3n represents a significant step forward for on-device AI, offering developers the performance, efficiency, and multimodal capabilities needed to build innovative applications directly on edge devices. With its flexible architecture and broad tool support, you're empowered to create high-impact AI experiences that run where your users are.
Ready to build? Get started with Gemma 3n today.
