Gemma 4 E2B IT vs Muse Glimmer 30B

Gemma 4 E2B IT

A small cousin for light agent work, tool-calling loops, transcription and image reading on a phone or laptop, under Apache 2.0. Google's 4-bit build needs about 5 GB with working space and runs in all the common runtimes. Google's card puts it far below larger Gemma 4 sizes on agent and coding tasks, with no published safety results.

Muse Glimmer 30B

A dense 30B multimodal cousin for local agent and coding work with images, documented tool calls and adjustable reasoning. Meta's 17 GB GGUF fits a 24 GB card and runs in llama.cpp, Ollama, vLLM, SGLang and Transformers. The main risks are one tool call per turn, no documented JSON output and a usage policy that adds limits to Apache 2.0.

Gemma 4 E2B IT

1. On the reference machine run llama-server -hf google/gemma-4-E2B-it-qat-q4_0-gguf --hf-file gemma-4-E2B_q4_0-it.gguf --jinja -c 131072, and add --mmproj with gemma-4-E2B-it-mmproj.gguf for images and audio
2. With Ollama run ollama run gemma4:e2b and raise num_ctx or OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH, since the default context is small and agents want at least 64K
3. In vLLM or SGLang pass --tool-call-parser gemma4 --reasoning-parser gemma4 (vLLM also --enable-auto-tool-choice), or tool calls come back as text; Google's w4a16 build is the 4-bit route there
4. Thinking is off by default; pass enable_thinking=True or start the system prompt with <|think|>, and drop earlier turns' thinking from history except on tool-call turns
5. Put images before the text and audio after it, keep audio to 30 seconds and video to 60 frames, and validate tool names and arguments before running them

Muse Glimmer 30B

1. Start it with llama serve -hf meta-models/Muse-Glimmer-30B-GGUF --hf-file Muse-Glimmer-30B-KQuant-17GB-Q4_K_M.gguf -ngl 99 -c 131072 --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8080 --chat-template-kwargs '{"reasoning_strength":"high"}' on llama.cpp b10353 or later, or ollama run muse-glimmer on Ollama 0.32.7 or later
2. In vLLM pass --tool-call-parser muse_glimmer --reasoning-parser muse_glimmer, in SGLang muse for both, in ExecuTorch --tool-parser atem. Without them tool calls come back as plain text
3. Set reasoning per request with chat_template_kwargs.reasoning_strength (low, medium, high or xhigh). llama.cpp and ExecuTorch don't read reasoning_effort, and ExecuTorch rejects it with a 400
4. Expect one tool call per turn and return each result before the next. ExecuTorch's server rejects tool_choice="required"
5. Keep temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95 and top_k 64, don't run greedy, and never stop on <|eom|>
6. Leave max_tokens room for reasoning, since in llama.cpp a request cut off mid-thought returns empty content with finish_reason length
7. For images add Meta's 1.4 GB mmproj GGUF, which takes the build to about 22 GB with the runtime's fifth