Small open models outcompete rivals twenty times their size

Claim

Google released Gemma 4 in sizes from 2 to 31 billion parameters delivering intelligence per parameter that outcompetes models twenty times larger, while Microsoft's AI chief conceded his company's new models were only mid-tier because it lacks the compute for frontier-scale training until later this year.

Reported metric: 20x smaller

Reporting date: 2026-04-03 (not necessarily the event date)

Sources

Attribution and reporting linked by this record; links do not imply independent verification.

• Welcome to April 3, 2026 (theinnermostloop.substack.com)