In addition to Google AI Edge Gallery, which lets users run Gemma models locally on their Macs, the company also released the Gemma 4 12B model and the Google AI Edge Eloquent dictation app for the Mac. Here are the details.
A bit of background
The majority of users who rely on LLMs for everyday tasks tend to use ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, which are cloud-based models running on OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google’s servers.
Another way to interact with LLMs is through local models. These are usually much smaller and less capable than the trillion-parameter models that run in the cloud, but they also come with several advantages.
For one, being less capable than cloud-based models does not mean they are bad. Also, they do not require an active internet connection, since they run on the computer’s own processing power. Additionally, the better the computer, the faster the responses, and the larger the models it can handle. And finally, because everything runs locally, these models are more private too, since conversation data does not need to leave the device.
