Gemma 4 and the Politics of Local AI

This is a submission for the Gemma 4 Challenge: Write About Gemma 4 Say a developer spends three weeks optimizing API calls to stay under the free tier. They're building a document summarizer for a small nonprofit. Every time usage spikes, the bill does too. They ship something half-functional because the full version is too expensive to run. Gemma 4 makes that story less inevitable. When Google released it, the coverage focused on specs, rightfully. Multimodal input, 128K context, runs on a Raspberry Pi, etc.