Is gemma-4-31B-it-assistant or gemma-3-1b-it smaller?

gemma-4-31B-it-assistant is smaller at Q4_K_M: 0.33 GiB against 0.75 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

gemma-3-1b-it — its KV cache at 32K context is 3.9x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

gemma-4-31B-it-assistant vs gemma-3-1b-it

At Q4_K_M, gemma-4-31B-it-assistant is the smaller download — 353,468,640 bytes against 806,058,240. At long context the gap widens: gemma-3-1b-it's KV cache at 32K is 3.9× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	gemma-4-31B-it-assistant	gemma-3-1b-it
Parameters	470M	1000M
Architecture	gemma4-assistant	gemma3
Layers	4	26
Native context	262,144	32,768
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	21	28
Smallest quantization	0.29 GiB	0.52 GiB
Q4_K_M	0.33 GiB	0.75 GiB
Licence	—	gemma

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	gemma-4-31B-it-assistant	gemma-3-1b-it	Ratio
4,096	0.13 GiB	0.04 GiB	3.58×
8,192	0.20 GiB	0.05 GiB	3.70×
16,384	0.32 GiB	0.08 GiB	3.81×
32,768	0.57 GiB	0.15 GiB	3.89×
65,536	1.07 GiB	0.27 GiB	3.94×
131,072	2.07 GiB	0.52 GiB	3.97×