Gemma 4 E4B IT vs MiniMax-M2.7

Gemma 4 E4B 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 7 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.

MiniMax-M2.7

A 230B mixture-of-experts model for coding and agent harnesses, with parallel tool calls, about 200K of context and parsers in vLLM and SGLang. It needs a 4 GPU server for FP8 or about 166 GB for a 4-bit library build, and it always thinks. The main risk is the licence, switched to non-commercial two days after release.

Gemma 4 E4B IT

1. On the reference machine run llama-server -hf google/gemma-4-E4B-it-qat-q4_0-gguf --hf-file gemma-4-E4B_q4_0-it.gguf --jinja -c 131072, and add --mmproj with gemma-4-E4B-it-mmproj.gguf for images and audio
2. With Ollama run ollama run gemma4:e4b 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

MiniMax-M2.7

1. Check the use is personal, research or non-profit before starting it; anything commercial needs MiniMax's written authorisation, and commercial users must show Built with MiniMax M2.7
2. Start it with vLLM on 4 GPUs of 96 GB, SAFETENSORS_FAST_GPU=1 vllm serve MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M2.7 --trust-remote-code --tensor-parallel-size 4 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser minimax_m2 --reasoning-parser minimax_m2_append_think
3. In SGLang use --tool-call-parser minimax-m2 and --reasoning-parser minimax-append-think, with --trust-remote-code
4. MiniMax's guides budget 220 GB for the weights and 240 GB per 1M tokens of KV cache, with 196K the most per sequence
5. On one large-memory machine, LM Studio's catalogue entry minimax/minimax-m2.7 lists a 138 GB Q4_K_M GGUF and states 138 GB minimum memory
6. Sample with temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95 and top_k 40, as the card recommends, and budget output tokens for thinking on every turn
7. Pin Transformers 4.57.1 as MiniMax's guide does; a report that it fails on Transformers v5 has no answer
8. Without the hardware, call it through Novita, Featherless AI or DeepInfra; MiniMax's own API retires M2.7 on 18 November 2026