Simon Willison’s Weblog

Introducing Gemma 3 270M: The compact model for hyper-efficient AI (via) New from Google:

Gemma 3 270M, a compact, 270-million parameter model designed from the ground up for task-specific fine-tuning with strong instruction-following and text structuring capabilities already trained in.

This model is tiny. The version I tried was the LM Studio GGUF one, a 241MB download.

It works! You can say "hi" to it and ask it very basic questions like "What is the capital of France".

I tried "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" about a dozen times and didn't once get back an SVG that was more than just a blank square... but at one point it did decide to write me this poem instead, which was nice:

+-----------------------+
|   Pelican Riding Bike |
+-----------------------+
|  This is the cat!  |
|  He's got big wings and a happy tail.  |
|  He loves to ride his bike!  |
+-----------------------+
|   Bike lights are shining bright.  |
|   He's got a shiny top, too!  |
|   He's ready for adventure!  |
+-----------------------+

That's not really the point though. The Gemma 3 team make it very clear that the goal of this model is to support fine-tuning: a model this tiny is never going to be useful for general purpose LLM tasks, but given the right fine-tuning data it should be able to specialize for all sorts of things:

In engineering, success is defined by efficiency, not just raw power. You wouldn't use a sledgehammer to hang a picture frame. The same principle applies to building with AI.

Gemma 3 270M embodies this "right tool for the job" philosophy. It's a high-quality foundation model that follows instructions well out of the box, and its true power is unlocked through fine-tuning. Once specialized, it can execute tasks like text classification and data extraction with remarkable accuracy, speed, and cost-effectiveness. By starting with a compact, capable model, you can build production systems that are lean, fast, and dramatically cheaper to operate.

Here's their tutorial on Full Model Fine-Tune using Hugging Face Transformers, which I have not yet attempted to follow.

I imagine this model will be particularly fun to play with directly in a browser using transformers.js.

Update: It is! Here's a bedtime story generator using Transformers.js (requires WebGPU, so Chrome-like browsers only). Here's the source code for that demo.

# 5:22 pm / google, ai, generative-ai, local-llms, llms, llm, gemini, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, gemma, llm-release, lm-studio