Field Guide · Week of 17 August 2026
Gemma 4 26B A4B
Google · United States · Google
A larger brain that only wakes a few billion parameters at a time. The best local model on a 32 GB Mac this week.
- Where it runs
- Runs on your computer
- Memory
- 24–32 GB (4-bit)
- Size
- 26B MoE · 3.8B active
- License
- Apache 2.0
Why it is on this week’s list
Mixture-of-experts means quality without the full 26B tax. Hugging Face downloads put it at the top of the local pile.
Use it when
A 24 GB+ machine and work that needs more range than 12B.
Skip it when
16 GB or less — take the 12B instead.
Published scores
Scores as of 17 August 2026. A blank test is not a zero. We just will not invent it.
- GPQA Diamond
- 82.3*
- SWE-Bench Verified
- —
- LiveCodeBench
- —
- MMLU / MMLU-Pro
- 82.6*
- AIME
- —
- Humanity’s Last Exam
- —
Google Gemma 4 card · 2026-07-30
No public number we will stand behind.
No public number we will stand behind.
Google Gemma 4 card · 2026-07-30
MMLU-Pro.
No public number we will stand behind.
No public number we will stand behind.