Google releases Gemma 3 as open weights under Apache 2.0 — the semi-open era ends, and Llama 4 just lost its licensing edge

Google DeepMind published Gemma 3 on August 5, 2026: a 27-billion-parameter model under the Apache 2.0 license, with a one-million-token context window and a 7B variant that beats Llama 4 8B on MMLU-Pro. If you were hesitating between Llama and Gemma for your next deployment, the decision just got simpler.