Show HN: Gemma 4 Multimodal Fine-Tuner for Apple Silicon
by MediaSquirrel on 4/7/2026, 7:37:05 PM
About six months ago, I started working on a project to fine-tune Whisper locally on my M2 Ultra Mac Studio with a limited compute budget. I got into it. The problem I had at the time was I had 15,000 hours of audio data in Google Cloud Storage, and there was no way I could fit all the audio onto my local machine, so I built a system to stream data from my GCS to my machine during training.<p>Gemma 3n came out, so I added that. Kinda went nuts, tbh.<p>Then I put it on the shelf.<p>When Gemma 4 came out a few days ago, I dusted it off, cleaned it up, broke out the Gemma part from the Whisper fine-tuning and added support for Gemma 4.<p>I'm presenting it for you here today to play with, fork and improve upon.<p>One thing I have learned so far: It's very easy to OOM when you fine-tune on longer sequences! My local Mac Studio has 64GB RAM, so I run out of memory constantly.<p>Anywho, given how much interest there is in Gemma 4, and frankly, the fact that you can't really do audio fine-tuning with MLX, that's really the reason this exists (in addition to my personal interest). I would have preferred to use MLX and not have had to make this, but here we are. Welcome to my little side quest.<p>And so I made this. I hope you have as much fun using it as I had fun making it.<p>-Matt
https://github.com/mattmireles/gemma-tuner-multimodal
Comments
by: LuxBennu
I run whisper large-v3 on an m2 max 96gb and even with just inference the memory gets tight on longer audio, can only imagine what fine-tuning looks like. Does the 64gb vs 96gb make a meaningful difference for gemma 4 fine-tuning or does it just push the oom wall back a bit? Been wanting to try local fine-tuning on apple silicon but the tooling gap has kept me on inference only so far.
4/7/2026, 8:28:08 PM
by: craze3
Nice! I've been wanting to try local audio fine-tuning. Hopefully it works with music vocals too
4/7/2026, 8:02:00 PM
by: yousifa
This is super cool, will definitely try it out! Nice work
4/7/2026, 8:35:04 PM
by: dsabanin
Thanks for doing this. Looks interesting, I'm going to check it out soon.
4/7/2026, 7:50:28 PM
by: pivoshenko
nice!
4/7/2026, 8:59:34 PM