Google has made good on its promise to open up its most powerful AI model, Gemini 1.5 Pro, to the public following a beta release for developers last month.
Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro is capable of handling more complex tasks than previous AI models, such as analyzing entire text libraries, feature-length Hollywood films, or nearly an entire day's worth of audio data. . That's 20 times more data than OpenAI's GPT-4o and about 10 times more data than Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet is capable of handling.
Google said in its announcement that it aims to put faster and lower-cost tools into the hands of AI developers, and to “enable new use cases, increased production robustness and higher reliability.”
Image: Google
Google previously unveiled the model in May, with videos showcasing how a select group of beta testers were able to put its capabilities to use. For example, machine learning engineer Lucas Atkins fed the model with the entire Python library and asked questions to help solve a problem. “It nailed it,” he said in the video. “It can find specific references to comments and specific requests from people in the code.”
Another beta tester made a video of his entire bookshelf, and Gemini created a database of all the books he owned — a task nearly impossible to achieve with traditional AI chatbots.
Gemma 2 comes to dominate the open source space.
But Google is also making waves in the open source community. The company today released Gemma 2 27B, an open source large tongue model that quickly claimed the open source model throne with high quality response, according to the LLM Arena rating.
Google claims that Gemma 2 “offers best-in-class performance, runs incredibly fast across a variety of hardware and easily integrates with other AI tools.” The company says it aims to compete with models “more than twice its size”.
Image: Google
Gemma 2's license allows free access and redistribution, but is still not the same as traditional open source licenses such as MIT or Apache. The model is designed for more accessible and budget-friendly AI deployments in both its 27B and smaller 9B versions.
This is important for both average and enterprise users because, unlike what close-in models offer, a powerful open model like Gemma is highly customizable. This means users can fine-tune their models to optimize for specific tasks, while protecting their data by running such models locally.
For example, Microsoft's small language model Phi-3 is specially tuned for mathematical problems, and can beat larger models like Llama-3 and even Gemma 2 in this field. .
Image: Microsoft
Gemma 2 is now available in Google AI Studio, with model weights available for download from Kaggle and Hugging Face Models with the powerful Gemini 1.5 Pro available for developers to test on Vertex AI.