Comment by dofm
4 hours ago
I would contend that the actual big story is the gallery app:
https://developers.google.com/edge/gallery
Anyone with a 16GB Mac — that is quite a lot of journalists, surely — can download that, install a model into it, and play.
Surely journalists have to start asking questions at least about OpenAI's consumer revenue projections now.
I am a major, major AI cynic, but I decided to be an informed cynic so I've been playing with local models for agentic work and a bit of CAD-to-image generation. I really quite like the 26B Gemma model — I've been using it to teach myself some fundamental things and learn OpenCode without developing a cloud dependency. It writes fairly good code and it is helping me learn the things I want to learn at a pace that I prefer.
But if this 12B model is even half as close as they say it is, this casts some doubt on the consumer end of the cloud business model, at least in the short term.
(Not clear if this app is using the MTP drafters; I've still not got them working with Gemma myself, though the Qwen 3.6 built-in MTP support is super in LM Studio)
I had discounted Edge Gallery because it didn't support system prompts, but now it does so I will give it another go. I believe the implementation does use MTP since I got an update to Gemma-4-E4B on iOS indicating such, and on macOS it's very speedy.
However, on my 18GB RAM MacBook Pro, selecting Gemma-4-12B-it results in this error:
> The model "Gemma-4-12B-it' requires more memory (RAM) than is available on your device.
So yeah, my questions about the 16GB marketing copy are fair.
Interesting; they may have fluffed up somewhere then.
(Though perhaps it'll squeeze in with a small context window? Not sure I understand that aspect yet)
It does seem to use MTP, yes, and it is quite quick — seemingly the underlying LiteRT stuff can do MTP with Gemma 4 and presumably MTP is a big part of the practicality picture here.
The system prompt thing was a surprise when I poked around.