Generative AI development is incredibly fast-paced. Just a few months after Google first announced its next-generationGeminimodel, the company recently went public with the next version of its generative model, Gemini 1.5. Just as all eyes are focused onGemini and its big GPT competitionfrom OpenAI, Google has announced yet another AI advancement. The company has revealed Gemma, its new family of open models developed by DeepMind and other divisions.
Google saysin its announcementthe new Gemma models were built for responsible AI development and are based on the same research and technology also used for Gemini. Like Gemini, the models are available in different sizes: Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B. Each of them is released with pre-trained and instruction-tuned variants.
Thanks to the shared resources across Gemini and Gemma, Google claims that “Gemma surpasses significantly larger models on key benchmarks while adhering to our rigorous standards for safe and responsible outputs.” At the same time, both models can run locally on developers’ computers.
Gemma is also coming to Google Cloud, where customers can use and customize them in Vertex AI and run them on the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), becoming part of Google’s repertoire of more than 130 available models, including Gemini itself. First time Google Cloud customers can get $300 in free credits towards using Gemma, and researchers can apply to get up to $500,000 to advance their projects. Gemma is also available for free in Kaggle, which is a free tier for Colab notebooks.
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In contrast to the Gemini model with its public-facing product carrying the same name, Gemma is solely meant as a product and project tailored for developers and researchers. It’s true that developers can use APIs to hook into Gemini itself for their own projects as well, but Gemma is an open model that serves as an alternative to API access. Google nevertheless wants to make clear in the naming scheme that the two are related. Like Gemini, which means twims, Gemma’s name is also derived from Latin, translating to “precious stone” (which is also where the term gemstone comes from).
