Run Gemma 4 locally (video)

A new YouTube tutorial is showing developers how to run Google’s Gemma 4 model on their own machines with Ollama instead of a cloud application programming interface. (youtube.com) Running a model locally means the software generates answers on your laptop or workstation, not on a remote server. Google’s Gemma docs say Ollama can run quantized Gemma models on a laptop or other small device, and the basic setup starts with `ollama pull gemma4`. (ai.google.dev) Quantization is a compression step that trades some output quality for lower memory and compute use. Google says that is how frameworks such as Ollama and llama.cpp make Gemma practical on hardware without a graphics processing unit. (ai.google.dev) Gemma 4 is Google DeepMind’s newest open model family, with four main sizes in Ollama: E2B, E4B, 26B and 31B. Google says the smaller E-series models are aimed at phones and edge devices, while the 26B and 31B models target personal computers and coding assistants. (ai.google.dev) (deepmind.google) Ollama’s model page lists the default `gemma4` download at 9.6 gigabytes with a 128,000-token context window, while `gemma4:26b` is 18 gigabytes and `gemma4:31b` is 20 gigabytes with 256,000-token context windows. Ollama also shows launch hooks for Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and OpenClaw, which is why these tutorials are being framed around software engineering workflows instead of general chat. (ollama.com) Google pitches the same family for “agentic workflows,” function calling and coding, and its benchmark table shows Gemma 4 31B scoring 80.0% on LiveCodeBench v6, compared with 29.1% for Gemma 3 27B in the comparison shown on the product page. Those are vendor-published numbers, but they help explain why local coding demos are appearing immediately after release. (deepmind.google) The local setup pitch is straightforward: code and documents stay on the developer’s machine, response times can be shorter because there is no network round trip, and teams can test prompts or tools without sending repository data to an outside provider. Google says the workstation models are optimized for consumer graphics cards and can turn workstations into “local-first” artificial intelligence servers. (deepmind.google) There are limits. Google’s own Ollama guide says lower-compute versions use less precise data, which usually lowers output quality, and larger variants still need far more memory than the small edge models. (ai.google.dev) (ollama.com) That leaves the tutorial as less of a product launch than a workflow update: Gemma 4 is now in the same local toolbox developers already use for code generation, repository question answering and offline testing. The appeal is not that cloud models disappeared, but that a 2026 coding stack can now include a model running one terminal command away on the same machine. (ai.google.dev) (ollama.com)