Side-by-side comparison of Gemma 4 E4B Instruct (Google DeepMind · United States) and IBM Granite 4.1 8B (IBM · USA) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. Gemma 4 E4B Instruct is rated conditional; IBM Granite 4.1 8B is EU-ready. They part ways on training data: Gemma 4 E4B Instruct is "Domain-level summary", IBM Granite 4.1 8B is "Disclosed".
| Field | ||
|---|---|---|
| Summary | ||
| Verdict | Conditional Based on published licence terms, Gemma 4 E4B is an edge-optimised multimodal variant under pure Apache 2.0 with no prohibited-use carve-outs. Audio input (30s) and on-device deployment push GDPR biometric, AI Act emotion-recognition, and Art. 25 data-protection-by-design obligations entirely onto the integrator with no Google-side telemetry or kill-switch. | EU-ready Per the published model card, Granite 4.1 8B is an Apache 2.0 9B-parameter dense decoder with a 131k-token context, sourced from publicly-available datasets, internal synthetic data and human-curated material. IBM continues the unusual-for-the-industry training-data transparency that anchored the Granite 3 family, and offers IP indemnification when the model is consumed via watsonx — a strong default for regulated enterprise pilots that need a defensible weights-available alternative to hyperscaler frontier models. |
| Last reviewed | 2026-04-17 | 2026-05-03 |
| Open-weight | ||
| Licence | Apache 2.0 | Apache 2.0 |
| Commercial use | Unrestricted | Unrestricted |
| Training data | Domain-level summary | Disclosed |
| Origin | United States | USA |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | 15/100 | — |
| Speed | — | — |
| Blended price | — | — |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.