Google DeepMind Deleted the Vision Encoder. The Model Got Better at Hearing.

Google DeepMind's Gemma 4 technical report, published 19 June 2026, explains why a mid-sized open model performs like one several times larger. The answer is not scale. In the 12B, a 550-million-parameter vision encoder was replaced by a single 35-million-parameter matrix multiplication taking raw image patches, and the 305-million-parameter audio encoder was discarded entirely. The report's own…