senn-techAI Radar: Gemini 3.5 Flash & Gemma 4 — Fast in the Cloud, Open at Home
Google is serving both camps at once right now: a fast closed model for the cloud and an open one for your own premises. That very split is what makes the recent releases interesting.
Two Models, Two Worlds
- Gemini 3.5 Flash: optimized for agentic workflows and coding, with much faster output than its predecessors and strong results in tool-oriented benchmarks. Closed, runs in Google's cloud.
- Gemma 4 (12B): the open line, freely available on Hugging Face and therefore self-hostable — the counterpart to the closed Flash variant.
- Speed vs. sovereignty: Flash scores on pace and reach, Gemma on control and self-operation. Both from the same house.
The Caveat
Gemini 3.5 Flash is fast and cheap — but the inputs run through Google's cloud. For personal or confidential data, that remains a GDPR issue. Gemma 4 solves exactly that, at the cost of your own hardware and operations. The choice is not technical but one about data sovereignty.
Our Take
That Google serves both paths in parallel is more honest than it sounds: if you need speed for uncritical tasks, take Flash; if you want sovereignty over your data, host Gemma yourself. We judge it per task — and in the SME world, the answer lands on the open side more often than many expect.