Bring state-of-the-art agentic skills to the edge with Gemma 4
Summary
Google DeepMind launched Gemma 4 on April 2, 2026, a family of open models under the Apache 2.0 license, designed for on-device AI development. Gemma 4 enables agentic and autonomous AI use cases directly on hardware, supporting multi-step planning, offline code generation, audio-visual processing, and over 140 languages without specialized fine-tuning. Developers can access Gemma 4 via Android's built-in AICore Developer Preview or Google AI Edge. The Google AI Edge Gallery, available on iOS and Android, introduces "Agent Skills" for on-device multi-step workflows, allowing Gemma 4 to augment knowledge bases, produce interactive content like summaries and visualizations, expand core capabilities through integration with other models, and create comprehensive end-to-end conversational experiences. For broader device deployment, LiteRT-LM offers enhanced performance with features like minimal memory footprint (<1.5GB for Gemma 4 E2B), constrained decoding for structured outputs, and dynamic context handling up to 128K tokens. LiteRT-LM also brings Gemma 4 to IoT and edge devices like Raspberry Pi 5 and Qualcomm Dragonwing IQ8, with a new Python package and CLI tool for Linux, macOS, and Raspberry Pi.
Key takeaway
For AI Architects and CTOs evaluating on-device AI solutions, Gemma 4 offers a robust, open-source foundation for developing agentic applications across mobile, desktop, and IoT. Your teams can leverage its multi-step planning, multi-language support, and efficient deployment via LiteRT-LM to build autonomous, privacy-preserving experiences. Explore the Google AI Edge Gallery and LiteRT-LM documentation to understand its full capabilities and performance metrics on target hardware.
Key insights
Gemma 4 enables powerful, multi-modal, agentic AI experiences directly on diverse edge devices.
Principles
- On-device AI enhances privacy and reduces latency.
- Agentic AI extends LLM capabilities beyond chatbots.
Method
Google AI Edge Gallery provides a platform for building and experimenting with on-device agent skills, while LiteRT-LM optimizes Gemma 4 deployment across various hardware with memory efficiency and structured outputs.
In practice
- Use Agent Skills to query external knowledge bases.
- Integrate Gemma 4 with other models for rich content.
- Deploy Gemma 4 E2B on devices with <1.5GB memory.
Topics
- Gemma 4
- On-device AI
- Agentic AI
- Google AI Edge
- LiteRT-LM
Code references
Best for: AI Architect, CTO, VP of Engineering/Data, AI Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer, Robotics Engineer
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Editorial summary, takeaway, and curation by AIssential. Original article published by Google Developers Blog - AI.