4 posts tagged “gemma”
Google's Gemma family of openly licensed Large Language Models.
2025
Notes on Google’s Gemma 3
Google’s Gemma team released an impressive new model today (under their not-open-source Gemma license). Gemma 3 comes in four sizes—1B, 4B, 12B, and 27B—and while 1B is text-only the larger three models are all multi-modal for vision:
[... 804 words]2024
gemma-2-27b-it-llamafile (via) Justine Tunney shipped llamafile packages of Google's new openly licensed (though definitely not open source) Gemma 2 27b model this morning.
I downloaded the gemma-2-27b-it.Q5_1.llamafile version (20.5GB) to my Mac, ran chmod 755 gemma-2-27b-it.Q5_1.llamafile and then ./gemma-2-27b-it.Q5_1.llamafile and now I'm trying it out through the llama.cpp default web UI in my browser. It works great.
It's a very capable model - currently sitting at position 12 on the LMSYS Arena making it the highest ranked open weights model - one position ahead of Llama-3-70b-Instruct and within striking distance of the GPT-4 class models.
PaliGemma model README (via) One of the more over-looked announcements from Google I/O yesterday was PaliGemma, an openly licensed VLM (Vision Language Model) in the Gemma family of models.
The model accepts an image and a text prompt. It outputs text, but that text can include special tokens representing regions on the image. This means it can return both bounding boxes and fuzzier segment outlines of detected objects, behavior that can be triggered using a prompt such as "segment puffins".
You can try it out on Hugging Face.
It's a 3B model, making it feasible to run on consumer hardware.
Gemma: Introducing new state-of-the-art open models. Google get in on the openly licensed LLM game: Gemma comes in two sizes, 2B and 7B, trained on 2 trillion and 6 trillion tokens respectively. The terms of use “permit responsible commercial usage”. In the benchmarks it appears to compare favorably to Mistral and Llama 2.
Something that caught my eye in the terms: “Google may update Gemma from time to time, and you must make reasonable efforts to use the latest version of Gemma.”
One of the biggest benefits of running your own model is that it can protect you from model updates that break your carefully tested prompts, so I’m not thrilled by that particular clause.
UPDATE: It turns out that clause isn’t uncommon—the phrase “You shall undertake reasonable efforts to use the latest version of the Model” is present in both the Stable Diffusion and BigScience Open RAIL-M licenses.