Google has released an open AI model called Gemma, which is designed to help developers build AI responsibly. The company has also introduced the Responsible Generative AI Toolkit alongside Gemma, which includes a debugging tool and a guide with best practices for AI development based on Google’s experience.
Gemma comes in two different sizes (Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B), both of which come with pre-trained and instruction-tuned variants. They are lightweight enough to run on a developer’s laptop or desktop computer. Google claims that 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 reinforcement learning based on human feedback to ensure Gemma’s instruction-tuned variants show responsible behaviors.
Companies and independent developers can 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 plans to introduce even more Gemma variants in the future for an even more diverse range of applications.
Google has also released the computer code that powers its online chatbot, which could help outside companies and independent software developers build online chatbots similar to Google’s own chatbot. The company released two A.I. language models, Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B, which are not Google’s most powerful A.I. technologies, but the company argued that they rivaled many of the industry’s leading systems.
The benefits of freely sharing the technology — called a large language model — outweigh the potential risks, according to Google. The company hopes to re-engage the third-party developer community to make sure Google-based models become an industry standard for how modern A.I. is built.
Google has no current plans to release its flagship A.I. model, Gemini, for free. Because it is more effective, Gemini could also cause more harm. This month, Google began charging for access to the most powerful version of Gemini.
