alt Hacker NewsI find it puzzling Google doesn’t actively promote its own cloud for inference of Gemma 4. Open source is great, love it. But shouldn’t Google want me to be able to use and pay for it through Gemini and vertex?
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A key thing to understand about Google is that under the hood is a collection of extremely powerful fiefdoms (many of which would stand as their own fortune 500, hell 100) that are all trying to act in their own interest. It's almost closer to a conglomerate than a company, where Google needs to bid internally against external players for resources.
If Gemma 4 is less lucrative than Claude to the Google Cloud kingdom, the Cloud kingdom will want you using Claude.
I wonder if for a model that small with a permissive license it might not be worth their time to host a commercial grade inference stack?
Might be easier to chuck it over the fence and let other providers handle it as it'll run in almost any commercial grade card?
Also speculating, but I wonder if it might also create a bit of a pricing problem relative to Gemini flashlight depending on serving cost and quality of outputs?
As a comparison, despite being SotA for their size, the smallest qwen models on openrouter (27b and 35b) are not at all worth using, as there are way bigger and better models for less oricemon a per token basis
Makes me wonder about the partnership with apple to use gemini. safe to assume apple has a preference for on-device, and the best open model (for consumer hardware at least) is a google property with an apache 2 license. Interesting dynamic and seemingly a bright spot in the market
What do you mean? It just works with Google AI Studio.
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There is a decent yt here going through what google's logic with gemma overall might be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXgZhGzqPmU
As for why cloud offer it - think it's just an effort to promote the brand. The gemmas are pretty small so they can host it without it being a major drain on the company. They have the infra anyway