Why startups should pair open models like Gemma 4 with frontier APIs

Google Cloud argues startups should combine open-weight models with frontier APIs rather than routing every request to one frontier model. It cites Gemma 4, which spans five sizes including a 31B dense model and a 26B A4B Mixture-of-Experts model, released under Apache 2.0. The article's examples report a 44% latency drop for Cue, from 876 ms to 488 ms, and a $0 server cost for BetterSpeak's on-device Gemma 4 E2B.