Google Just Made Your Laptop a Multimodal AI Workstation Yesterday, Google dropped Gemma 4 12B — and if you blinked, you might have missed why it matters. This isn't just another open-weight model. It's a unified, encoder-free multimodal model that handles text, images, and likely audio in a single stack. And it's designed to run on your laptop . For developers, that phrase is doing a lot of work. Let me explain what's actually new. What "Encoder-Free Multimodal" Actually Means Most multimodal s