Google's new open source Gemma 4 12B analyzes audio, video — and runs entirely locally on a typical 16GB enterprise laptop

Oh, Google has released Gemma 4 12B — an 11.95-billion-parameter open-weights model that can analyse audio and video while running entirely on a 'typical' 16GB enterprise laptop. Because nothing says 'responsible AI' like giving everyone with a moderately-priced laptop the ability to run multimodal models locally, with an Apache 2.0 license no less. Google's press release will no doubt wax lyrical about 'democratising AI' while conveniently forgetting that the same 'democratised' tech can be used to build surveillance tools, deepfakes, or automated harassment pipelines without any oversight whatsoever.

So what Google calls 'accessible' is actually 'accessible to people with money.' But hey, the open-source crowd is thrilled, because now they can fine-tune it to be even more 'efficient' at generating personalised spam. The real genius move is that Google gets to claim moral high ground by 'giving back to the community' while offloading responsibility for any subsequent misuse.

Naturally, the model's ability to process audio and video locally is a privacy win — until you realise that the same capability makes it perfect for corporate surveillance, illegal wiretapping, or building a competitor to Clearview AI from your bedroom. Google's official line will be that Gemma 4 is 'safe and responsible,' but as always, the safety measures are conveniently left as an exercise for the user. So welcome to the local AI era, where every laptop is a potential monster factory, and Google gets to smile and say 'we just built the tool.'