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Congrats to the Gemma 4 Challenge Winners!

#devchallenge #gemmachallenge #gemma
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May 28 Update: Winner announcement delayed until June 18: read the update here


Local AI is having a moment, and we want you to be part of it!

Running through May 24, the Gemma 4 Challenge invites you to explore open models. With the release of Gemma 4, Google's most capable open model family yet, we now have access to native multimodal capabilities, advanced reasoning, a 128K context window, and models that range from running on a Raspberry Pi, to phones, to powering large-scale deployments.

Whether you love to build or love to write, there's a prompt for you and a 3,000ドル prize pool up for grabs!

Read on to learn more.


Our Prompts

Build With Gemma 4

Your mandate is to build something useful or creative with any Gemma 4 model. The scope is wide open — you can build anything from an IoT integration to a multimodal tool to a long-context reasoning app. What matters is that Gemma 4 is doing real work at the heart of your project.

Build With Gemma 4 Submission Template

The most compelling submissions will make a clear case for why you chose the model you did and what that model unlocked.

Write About Gemma 4

Your mandate is to publish a post about Gemma 4 that educates, inspires, or sparks curiosity. There's no single right format — what matters is that your post offers something genuine and useful to the community.

Not sure what to write about? Here are some ideas:

Write About Gemma 4 Submission Template

Need inspiration? Check out how Google's own team fine-tuned Gemma 4 with Cloud Run Jobs. That’s the kind of hands-on, shareable knowledge is exactly what we're looking for.

Note: If you are primarily showing off a project, please submit to the Build with Gemma 4 prompt instead! Each submission is only allowed to be eligible for one of the two categories.


Which Model Is Right for You? 🤔

Gemma 4 model family spans three distinct architectures tailored for specific hardware requirements:

No matter which you choose, judges will be looking for intentional model selection — show us why your model was the right tool for the job.

Prizes 🏆

Five winners from the "Build with Gemma 4" prompt will receive:

Five winners from the "Write About Gemma 4" prompt will receive:

All participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge on their DEV profile.


Judging Criteria

Build With Gemma 4 submissions will be evaluated for:

Write About Gemma 4 submissions will be evaluated for:


Getting Started With Gemma 4 🚀

Gemma 4 is open — you have several ways to get started, including completely free options:


Important Dates

We can't wait to see what you build and write! Questions about the challenge? Drop them in the comments below.

Good luck and happy coding!

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francistrdev profile image
FrancisTRᴅᴇᴠ (っ◔◡◔)っ
📚 Full-Stack Developer 📚 🚀 DEV Community Moderator 🚀 ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ🍰🍔🍕 ((⚞(˶>ᗜ<˶)⚟)) "ᴀ ꜱᴍᴏᴏᴛʜ ꜱᴇᴀ ɴᴇᴠᴇʀ ᴍᴀᴅᴇ ᴀ ꜱᴋɪʟʟᴇᴅ ꜱᴀɪʟᴏʀ" - ꜰʀᴀɴᴋʟɪɴ ᴅ. ʀᴏᴏꜱᴇᴠᴇʟᴛ
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This challenge is either a make or break for me! Will probably do both, but we will see.

@jess If you are doing both prompts, would it be appropriate to do in one post or do you prefer to be separate post. I say this because I was thinking about writing about Gemma 4, but also showcase what I built (not going to spoil it yet).

Regardless, hope to see what the community builts/writes :D

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jess profile image
Jess Lee The DEV Team
Building DEV and Forem with everyone here. Interested in the future.
• Edited on • Edited

Hey @francistrdev! I would keep those as two separate submissions. The content should be different though, please don't just duplicate two posts.

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francistrdev profile image
FrancisTRᴅᴇᴠ (っ◔◡◔)っ
📚 Full-Stack Developer 📚 🚀 DEV Community Moderator 🚀 ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ🍰🍔🍕 ((⚞(˶>ᗜ<˶)⚟)) "ᴀ ꜱᴍᴏᴏᴛʜ ꜱᴇᴀ ɴᴇᴠᴇʀ ᴍᴀᴅᴇ ᴀ ꜱᴋɪʟʟᴇᴅ ꜱᴀɪʟᴏʀ" - ꜰʀᴀɴᴋʟɪɴ ᴅ. ʀᴏᴏꜱᴇᴠᴇʟᴛ
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    ☕ Open-Source Contributor for Forem and Virtual Coffee ☕
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Sounds good! Thanks! I also sent you an email on other stuff! Noticed you might be busy lol. lmk!

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v_rai_7a0813fcee9d16 profile image
Vikassh.
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Interesting perspective. Curious how others are handling this."

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Ben Halpern The DEV Team
A Canadian software developer who thinks he’s funny.
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This one is going to be great. I’m most excited about the IOT related use cases, but it all seems cool.

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Aashita
eat sleep code repeat is my niche
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I explored Gemma 4 through the lens of local AI ownership— how moving from cloud-only APIs to capable local models changes the experience for users. One of the most interesting parts for me was intentionally choosing the E4B model instead of defaulting to the largest variant, because accessibility matters just as much as raw capability. Feel free to check out my submission 😇
Excited to read what everyone else is building and writing!

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Hemapriya Kanagala
Hey, I'm Hema 👋 Developer, writer, and creator of Dev Opportunity Radar, a weekly series published every Friday on DEV, helping people discover opportunities they might otherwise miss.
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love this, definitely joining in 😄

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Fayaz
A Software Engineer who is not afraid of being replaced by AI, loves coding and writing with and without using AI, and values human life and human dignity far more than technological advancements.
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    Bangladesh
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    BSc. in Computer Science & Engineering
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    Building a new SaaS
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This is a yummy challenge!

Hope to see a lot of really useful projects, and at the same time some useless but still cool projects!

Love it 😍
Thanks to Google and the Dev team!

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cleverhoods profile image
Gábor Mészáros
Backend developer turned builder. 20 years in software, now building Reporails - instruction governance for coding agents. Writing about context engineering and patterns that make AI agents reliable.
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Rock & roll

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umarpathan profile image
Umar Pathan
Always learning, always building.
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This is a cool challenge. Gemma 4 should lead to some really interesting projects.

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ggle_in profile image
HARD IN SOFT OUT
I believe good technical writing should either teach you something or make you feel less alone in the dystopia. Preferably both.
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    gardener who love to code and write things. please let me know if i can fit the slot on your team.
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I want to.. I need to find something I could do with my potato laptop. it's hot even to compile cpp with 20 lines still waiting for +5 mins.

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ggle_in profile image
HARD IN SOFT OUT
I believe good technical writing should either teach you something or make you feel less alone in the dystopia. Preferably both.
  • Location
    Indonesia
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    still learning, havent found the end of education yet...
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    human! hey look... thats human too!
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    gardener who love to code and write things. please let me know if i can fit the slot on your team.
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ahh, theres solution <3 thank you google & ollama for the cloud <3 amazing!

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Paerrin
Physical Security Architect by day. Rust and embedded enthusiast by night. Playing with AI tooling and ML with local AI.
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Nice! I've already got some good testing with it in my agents memory.

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Vivek Shetye
Software Engineer (7+ yrs) building scalable systems and exploring Agentic AI. Sharing practical tutorials on AI workflows, automation, and multi-agent systems.
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This is exciting. definitely joining this challenge. 🤙

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