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Google DeepMind released its latest set of AI models, Gemma. Google Deepmind on Wednesday unveiled its newest set of AI models. Called Gemma, they are open for commercial use and redistribution by AI developers and researchers—a departure for a company that has been recently criticized for its closed AI technology by others in the field championing open collaboration in AI research.
The lightweight models are based on the research and tech used to build Gemini, Google’s marquee language model that competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But Gemma, which comes in two sizes, a smaller and larger version called Gemma 2B and 7B, can run directly on laptops and desktop computers. The idea is for developers and researchers to build on top of the models, similar to Facebook parent Meta’s LLaMA 2 model. Gemma’s debut as a more open type of AI model is something of an anomaly in Google’s recent AI strategy, which generally veers towards closed access. That has made it a polarizing player in the ongoing AI debate over open and closed research. On one side of the aisle are companies like Meta, Hugging Face and Mistral who advocate for open source access, in which companies publish a model’s source code and make it widely available in the name of scientific collaboration and progress. On the other side are companies like Google and OpenAI who advocate for a tightly controlled closed environment that they argue mitigates safety risks and can more easily prevent abuse. Google stopped short of releasing Gemma as fully open sourced, instead referring to it as an “open model.” That means the model's"weights," or pre-trained parameters, are available, but not the actual source code or training data, said Google spokesperson Jane Park. Google said the Gemma model will be available for"responsible commercial usage and distribution for all organizations, regardless of size." Does this mean OpenAI could create a variant and publish it? When asked, Park said, “The same terms would apply.” When Google last week released the most recent version of Gemini, called Gemini 1.5, the company only made software available to developers and Google’s cloud customers; For now it is closed to the general public. Gemma is different. And that may suggest a broadening strategy for Google, whose closed approach has drawn ire from several open source proponents, most notably Meta. “They're kind of becoming less and less open,” Meta chief scientist Yann LeCunDemis Hassabis, who leads Google DeepMind, has in the past pushed back against LeCun, accusing him of “fear mongering” in his calls for AI regulation. Hassabis has also argued that a closed approach is appropriate because companies need to manage risks before the systems become dangerous. As part of Gemma’s launch on Tuesday, Google also released an API with tools and guides for safe building with the model.
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