Record turnout for local and offline AI builds
We are so excited to announce the winners of the Gemma 4 Challenge!
This is officially our most participated-in challenge to date, and the range of submissions made that obvious from the start. We saw a ten-year-old GPU-less laptop pushed to its limits, a $50-a-month OCR bill replaced by a local vision pipeline, disaster scenes compressed into 200-byte emergency payloads, and a phone that notices when an elder living alone needs help. The sheer array of topics and builds made these a joy to read through.
Now, let's cut to the chase and celebrate our winners!
🎉 Congratulations To…
Build With Gemma 4 Winners
This prompt asked builders to put Gemma 4 to work, and the range of what came back was the whole story.
We saw the model packed onto a disaster-relief app for the Philippines that keeps functioning when the cell towers go down, turned into a lanyard-worn pair of eyes for blind and low-vision users, and routed through a strict tool-dispatcher so a 2B model could safely tap and type on someone's behalf. One submission ran entirely peer-to-peer so no prompt ever touched a server, and another distilled a HIPAA-bound DBA's 3 AM database panic into a six-section runbook that never left their laptop.
Across all of it, these projects show Gemma 4 expanding the map what can be built and who gets to use it.
Write About Gemma 4 Winners
The writing prompt covered just as much ground, from practical decision-making to deep architectural breakdowns to honest on-the-ground reporting.
One winner laid out exactly how to pick between Gemma 4's four variants before writing a single line of code, while another went under the hood of the model's vision system to explain how it compresses image patches into soft tokens. A third explored what an agentic Gemma 4 misinformation moderator for the Fediverse would actually have to contend with, a fourth shared the hard-won configuration tricks for getting real speed out of Gemma 4 E2B on Android, and the last took the open-model "catch-up" story to Freetown and tested it against the phones people actually carry.
Taken together, these posts are some of the most useful reference material the community has produced on Gemma 4 yet.
Prizes
The five “Build with Gemma 4” winners will receive:
- $500 USD cash prize
- DEV++ Membership
- Exclusive DEV Badge
The five “Write About Gemma 4” winners will receive:
- $100 USD cash prize
- DEV++ Membership
- Exclusive DEV Badge
All participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge on their DEV profile.
What's Next?
Check out the June Solstice Game Jam happening now:
Thank you again to everyone who participated.
See you next time 💜
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