Google introduces a lightweight open AI model called Gemma

Google has released an open AI model called Gemma, which it says is created using the same research and technology that was used to build its Gemini AI models. The company says Gemma is its contribution to the open community and is meant to help developers “in building AI responsibly.” As such, it also introduced the Responsible Generative AI Toolkit alongside Gemma. It contains a debugging tool, as well as a guide with best practices for AI development based on Google’s experience.

The company has made Gemma available in two different sizes — Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B — which both come with pre-trained and instruction-tuned variants and are both lightweight enough to run directly on a developer’s laptop or desktop computer. Google says Gemma surpasses much larger models when it comes to key benchmarks and that both model sizes outperform other open models out there.

In addition to being powerful, the Gemma models were trained to be safe. Google used automated techniques to strip personal information from the data it used to train the models, and it used reinforcement learning based on human feedback to ensure Gemma’s instruction-tuned variants show responsible behaviors. Companies and independent developers could use Gemma to create AI-powered applications, especially if none of the currently available open models are powerful enough for what they want to build.

Google has plans to introduce even more Gemma variants in the future for an even more diverse range of applications. That said, those who want to start working with the models right now can access them through data science platform Kaggle, the company’s Colab notebooks or through Google Cloud.