Gemma 4 is efficient with thinking tokens, but it will also happily reason for 10+ minutes if you prompt it to do so.

Tested both 26b and 31b in AI Studio. The task I asked of it was to crack a cypher. The top closed source models can crack this cypher at max thinking parameters, and Kimi 2.5 Thinking and Deepseek 3.2 are the only open source models to crack the cypher without tool use. (Of course, with the closed