As the AI Engineer World’s Fair kicked off officially on Monday, the halls were filled for the traditional workshop day, where coders from across the country — and in some cases from around the world — worked on practical code and got firsthand advice.
To say the topics were diverse would be an understatement. Talks ranged from practical advice in setting up, monitoring, and harnessing AI agents, to capture-the-flag tournaments and deep dives into some of the more esoteric aspects of AI support in software. Some of the talks were literally packed out, so future attendees should be prepared to get to sessions a little early next year.
One of the most popular sessions was an introduction by Paige Bailey (@dynamicwebpaige), AI Developer Relations Engineering Lead for Google DeepMind, to its new Gemma 4 model. As she explains in today’s issue of The Daily Context, Gemma 4 may be an open model, but it’s far from second best to commercial models.
“For years, ‘open’ models meant ‘good enough for a local demo, but definitely not good enough for production,’” she said.
“Gemma 4 — as well as many other open models on the market today, like GLM-5.2 — is shattering that ceiling entirely. We built Gemma 4 on the exact same research foundations that power our flagship Gemini models, and it shows. Across complex reasoning, multimodal understanding, and multilingual tasks, Gemma 4 punches far above what you’d expect from a model you can download and run yourself.”
