Gemma 4 release shows how unfortunate Infraestruturas de Portugal timing on BIA was

Google launched last week a new version of its open source - sorry, open weights - Gemma models. So far they seem to work really well for open weights models and a step up from last year's Gemma 3, as per their report card. They also have nice, long context windows too.

The Gemma 4 family of models also comes with another novelty for Google models that is the adoption of an Apache 2.0 license instead of the custom license Google had saddled Gemma 3 with. This means fewer restrictions on the use of the models thus making them from a licensing perspective a better fit for Infraestruturas de Portugal BIA AI bot/agent.

This goes to show that with a market in flux, making crucial AI infrastructure decisions and investments is risky, especially when buying BIA as a product vs using a more off the shelf service (assuming such exists). It does not help that Infraestruturas de Portugal decided to use the open procedure for this contract thus meaning once bids were submitted last month they cannot now be amended to built around a more modern AI model like Gemma 4.