GoKawiilIn addition to Google AI Edge Gallery, which lets users run Gemma models locally on their Macs, the company also released the Gemma 4 12B model and the Google AI Edge Eloquent dictation app for the Mac. Here are the details.
A bit of background
The majority of users who rely on LLMs for everyday tasks tend to use ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, which are cloud-based models running on OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google’s servers.
Another way to interact with LLMs is through local models. These are usually much smaller and less capable than the trillion-parameter models that run in the cloud, but they also come with several advantages.
For one, being less capable than cloud-based models does not mean they are bad. Also, they do not require an active internet connection, since they run on the computer’s own processing power. Additionally, the better the computer, the faster the responses, and the larger the models it can handle. And finally, because everything runs locally, these models are more private too, since conversation data does not need to leave the device.
There are a few ways to install local models on a Mac, and we covered this here, when OpenAI released its own open models. But in a nutshell, you need to install platforms such as Ollama and LM Studio, and then install a model that can runs smoothly on your Mac’s hardware.
Hugging Face hosts thousands of open models to choose from, including those from frontier labs. However, platforms such as Ollama and LM Studio also offer ways to install these models directly from them.
Which brings us to Google AI Edge Gallery, Google’s platform for running AI models locally. Google already offered a Google AI Edge Gallery app for Android and for iOS, but today the company released it for macOS as well.
Google AI Edge Gallery and Gemma 4 12B
One thing to note right from the get-go is that, contrary to Ollama and LM Studio, which allow users to install any AI model compatible with their hardware, Google AI Edge Gallery for Mac currently only offers access to 5 of Google’s own models, where ‘it’ stands for instruct, meaning they can be tuned to follow user instructions rather than simply complete text:
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