Google introduces Gemma open source AI models
Context:
- After the recent OpenAI’s text-to-video model Sora dominated news feeds last week, Google has now introduced Gemma which is its latest open artificial intelligence (AI) offering.
- Google has, in the past few months, introduced its Gemini models which are large and mid-sized models meant for complex tasks.
- The newly unveiled Gemma, however, is a lightweight, smaller model and is aimed at helping developers worldwide build AI responsibly, in compliance with Google’s AI principles.
What is Gemma?
- Gemma is a family of lightweight state-of-the-art open models which has been built using the same research and technology used in Gemini models by Google DeepMind, and other teams across Google.
- Google has informed that that its name is derived from the Latin word ‘gemma,’ which translates to precious stone.
- Gemma is being offered currently in two model sizes, Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B, which have been released with pre-trained and instruction-tuned variants.
- Along with Gemma, Google has also released a new Responsible Generative AI toolkit which provides guidance and essential tools for creating safer AI applications with Gemma.
- Google has informed that the pre-trained and instruction-tuned Gemma models can run on laptops, workstations, or even on Google Cloud with easy deployment on Vertex AI and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).
- Gemma’s optimisation for multiple AI hardware platforms ensures industry-leading performance which include NVIDIA GPUs and Google Cloud TPUs.
How does Gemma perform?
- Google has noted that Gemma shares some key technical and infrastructure components with Gemini, which is its most capable AI model to date.
- Because of its underlying technology, both Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B are capable of achieving the ‘best-in-class performance’ for their sizes when compared to the other open models.
- Gemma has reportedly outperformed significantly larger models on key benchmarks while complying with rigorous standards for safe and also responsible outputs.
What is meant by Gemma is responsible by design’?
- Google claims that Gemma has been designed in compliance with its various AI principles.
- The tech giant Google has said that to make Gemma pre-trained models safe and reliable, they used automated techniques to filter certain personal information and sensitive data from its training sets.
- Google has also fine-tuned Gemma’s models with human feedback to promote responsible behaviours, and also conducted thorough evaluations, including manual and automated testing to minimise risk.
- Besides this, Google is also providing a toolkit alongside Gemma to help developers prioritise safety in the AI applications.
- This toolkit comes with methods for building safety classifiers, debugging tools, and also guidance based on Google’s experience in developing large language models.