Gemma 4 Shows Strong Reasoning Performance with Thinking Tokens

Gemma 4's thinking token capability delivers impressive results on complex reasoning tasks when deployed locally. Community testing reveals both the 26B and 31B variants can solve challenging ciphers without external tools—a feat previously limited to proprietary models like OpenAI's o1 variants and Kimi 2.5 Thinking.

The model efficiently allocates thinking tokens for the task at hand but also responds to prompt-driven reasoning requests, enabling 10+ minute inference sessions if instructed. This flexibility makes Gemma 4 valuable for local deployments requiring interpretable reasoning, from analysis tasks to problem-solving workflows.

For practitioners, this represents a maturing capability in open-source local inference: access to competitive reasoning performance without cloud dependencies, unlocking use cases previously reserved for proprietary APIs.

Source: r/LocalLLaMA · Relevance: 8/10