Instructions to use google/gemma-4-31B-it with libraries, inference providers, notebooks, and local apps. Follow these links to get started.

Libraries

How to use google/gemma-4-31B-it with Transformers:

# Use a pipeline as a high-level helper
from transformers import pipeline

pipe = pipeline("image-text-to-text", model="google/gemma-4-31B-it")
messages = [
    {
        "role": "user",
        "content": [
            {"type": "image", "url": "https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingface/documentation-images/resolve/main/p-blog/candy.JPG"},
            {"type": "text", "text": "What animal is on the candy?"}
        ]
    },
]
pipe(text=messages)

# Load model directly
from transformers import AutoProcessor, AutoModelForImageTextToText

processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained("google/gemma-4-31B-it")
model = AutoModelForImageTextToText.from_pretrained("google/gemma-4-31B-it")
messages = [
    {
        "role": "user",
        "content": [
            {"type": "image", "url": "https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingface/documentation-images/resolve/main/p-blog/candy.JPG"},
            {"type": "text", "text": "What animal is on the candy?"}
        ]
    },
]
inputs = processor.apply_chat_template(
	messages,
	add_generation_prompt=True,
	tokenize=True,
	return_dict=True,
	return_tensors="pt",
).to(model.device)

outputs = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=40)
print(processor.decode(outputs[0][inputs["input_ids"].shape[-1]:]))

Inference
HuggingChat
Notebooks
Google Colab
Kaggle
Local Apps

vLLM

How to use google/gemma-4-31B-it with vLLM:

Install from pip and serve model

# Install vLLM from pip:
pip install vllm
# Start the vLLM server:
vllm serve "google/gemma-4-31B-it"
# Call the server using curl (OpenAI-compatible API):
curl -X POST "http://localhost:8000/v1/chat/completions" \
	-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
	--data '{
		"model": "google/gemma-4-31B-it",
		"messages": [
			{
				"role": "user",
				"content": [
					{
						"type": "text",
						"text": "Describe this image in one sentence."
					},
					{
						"type": "image_url",
						"image_url": {
							"url": "https://cdn.britannica.com/61/93061-050-99147DCE/Statue-of-Liberty-Island-New-York-Bay.jpg"
						}
					}
				]
			}
		]
	}'

Use Docker

docker model run hf.co/google/gemma-4-31B-it

SGLang

How to use google/gemma-4-31B-it with SGLang:

Install from pip and serve model

# Install SGLang from pip:
pip install sglang
# Start the SGLang server:
python3 -m sglang.launch_server \
    --model-path "google/gemma-4-31B-it" \
    --host 0.0.0.0 \
    --port 30000
# Call the server using curl (OpenAI-compatible API):
curl -X POST "http://localhost:30000/v1/chat/completions" \
	-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
	--data '{
		"model": "google/gemma-4-31B-it",
		"messages": [
			{
				"role": "user",
				"content": [
					{
						"type": "text",
						"text": "Describe this image in one sentence."
					},
					{
						"type": "image_url",
						"image_url": {
							"url": "https://cdn.britannica.com/61/93061-050-99147DCE/Statue-of-Liberty-Island-New-York-Bay.jpg"
						}
					}
				]
			}
		]
	}'

Use Docker images

docker run --gpus all \
    --shm-size 32g \
    -p 30000:30000 \
    -v ~/.cache/huggingface:/root/.cache/huggingface \
    --env "HF_TOKEN=<secret>" \
    --ipc=host \
    lmsysorg/sglang:latest \
    python3 -m sglang.launch_server \
        --model-path "google/gemma-4-31B-it" \
        --host 0.0.0.0 \
        --port 30000
# Call the server using curl (OpenAI-compatible API):
curl -X POST "http://localhost:30000/v1/chat/completions" \
	-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
	--data '{
		"model": "google/gemma-4-31B-it",
		"messages": [
			{
				"role": "user",
				"content": [
					{
						"type": "text",
						"text": "Describe this image in one sentence."
					},
					{
						"type": "image_url",
						"image_url": {
							"url": "https://cdn.britannica.com/61/93061-050-99147DCE/Statue-of-Liberty-Island-New-York-Bay.jpg"
						}
					}
				]
			}
		]
	}'

Docker Model Runner
How to use google/gemma-4-31B-it with Docker Model Runner:
```
docker model run hf.co/google/gemma-4-31B-it
```

..but where's the bigger one?

#18

by jerryblunder - opened Apr 3

Discussion

jerryblunder

Apr 3

too smol google love open ai google give more parameters

srikanta-221

Google org Apr 6

Hi @jerryblunder ,

We hear you, when the model sizes are often measured in the hundreds of billion of parameters, a 31B model can seem relatively small at first glance.

The design philosophy behind the Gemma family is intentional. Rather than focusing purely on scaling parameter count, we prioritise efficiency and capability per parameter. With Gemma 4, this includes both dense (31B) and MOE (26B) architectures, designed to deliver strong performance across reasoning, multimodal tasks and long context use cases.

A key goal is accessibility. Gemma models are built so developers can run, fine-tune, and deploy them on their own infrastructure, ranging from workstations to smaller scale GPU setups, without requiring large data center resources. This is paired with a permissive Apache 2.0 license, enabling broad experimentation and customisation.

For applications that require significantly larger models, we offer the Gemini Family. These models operate at a different scale and are delivered via API on Google infrastructure, rather than as open weights. So while Gemma models may appear smaller on paper, the tradeoff is deliberate: practical deployability, openness and strong performance for their size, rather than maximum parameter count alone.

Thank you!

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