MediaSquirrelShow HN: Gemma 4 Multimodal Fine-Tuner for Apple Silicon
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.
Gemma 3n came out, so I added that. Kinda went nuts, tbh.
Then I put it on the shelf.
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.
I'm presenting it for you here today to play with, fork and improve upon.
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.
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.
And so I made this. I hope you have as much fun using it as I had fun making it.
-Matt
GitHub - mattmireles/gemma-tuner-multimodal: Fine-tune Gemma 4 and 3n with audio, images and text on Apple Silicon, using PyTorch and Metal Performance Shaders.
Fine-tune Gemma 4 and 3n with audio, images and text on Apple Silicon, using PyTorch and Metal Performance Shaders. - mattmireles/gemma-tuner-multimodal