Gemma LITE (E2B) — a smaller dictionary, the same mind

A Model Derivative of Google's Gemma 3n E2B, made for phones that cannot hold the original in memory.

Nothing about the model's reasoning was changed. All 35 transformer blocks are byte-for-byte the quantisation they started as. The only modification is to one tensor.

What was modified

per_layer_token_embd.weight — requantised from q6_K to q4_0, matching the precision of every layer that does the actual reasoning.

That single tensor is 57% of the original file: 1,837 MiB of a 3,179 MiB model, shaped [8960, 262144]. It is a lookup table — one row of about 7 KB is read per token — and it was stored at higher precision than the layers doing the thinking, every one of which is q4_0.

llama-quantize --allow-requantize \
  --tensor-type per_layer_token_embd=q4_0 \
  gemma-3n-E2B-it-q4_0.gguf gemma-lite-e2b-q4.gguf Q4_0
file per_layer_token_embd
source (E2B q4_0) 3.12 GiB 1,837 MiB (q6_K)
LITE 2.56 GiB 1,270 MiB (q4_0)

⚠️ A q2_K version of this model was published here and has been withdrawn

An earlier build took the same tensor down to q2_K, reaching 2.04 GiB. It passed a single-turn audition and failed badly over a real conversation. It was replaced on 2026-08-12 and should not be used.

Over 30 turns, q2_K against this q4_0 build:

q2_K (withdrawn) q4_0 (this file)
repetition, second half (4-gram overlap) 0.175, peaking 0.43 0.000
replies containing malformed control tokens 17 of 30 3 of 30
corrupted words (It't what it is) throughout none
latency, second half 5,600 ms 3,963 ms

q2_K collapsed into a verbal tic — "That's what it is" in nearly every reply after turn 12 — emitted malformed control tokens such as <end_of_of_turn> into visible output, and confidently misremembered the conversation it was in.

☠️ The lesson, if you are quantising embeddings yourself: a single-turn test cannot see this. The damage only appears once enough context has to be held at once. Test over a long conversation, not one reply.

Measured

Galaxy S22 Ultra (8 GB): the unmodified model was killed by Android's low-memory killer eleven times and never finished loading.

ROG Phone 8 Pro, llama.cpp with OpenCL, 8192 context:

unevictable (anonymous) memory ~178 MiB
GPU / shmem ~80 MiB
prompt eval 211 tok/s
generation 10.7 tok/s

A ~3,800-token system prompt prefills in about 18 seconds.

☠️ The GPU path is not an optimisation — it is why this fits. On CPU the same model holds 1,642 MiB of unevictable memory, roughly 9× more, which is the shape of failure that killed the unmodified model on 8 GB.

Quality

☠️ No perplexity or standardised benchmark has been run. What exists is a 30-turn conversational soak and a 17-prompt content probe, both single-sample. If you need measured quality, measure it.

Note the numbers above are for this file at 4,300 tokens of context; behaviour at the full 8,192 has not been characterised.

What it cannot do

The source GGUF carries no vision or audio encoder tensors, so this is a text-only model. Gemma 3n's image and audio input paths are not present.

Licence

Gemma 3n is provided under and subject to the Gemma Terms of Use: https://ai.google.dev/gemma/terms

This is a modified version. The modification is described above and is limited to the requantisation of a single tensor. The Gemma Terms, including the Prohibited Use Policy, apply to this derivative and to anything derived from it.

Base model: google/gemma-3n-E2B-it.

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