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Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model

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Re: Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model

#21

Post by estearum »

ethanpil wrote: post #13

What's Google's business case for releasing open models? Don't get me wrong, I am grateful and appreciative of these releases. I'm trying to understand how it fits into their bigger picture as a for profit company? Are they not helping competitors build on the novel technology they have developed? Is it simply goodwill and/or marketing? Or am I missing something strategic?

It's to destroy possible footholds for competitors and prevent them from making money in segments that Google doesn't care too much about, but can trivially commoditize.

Re: Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model

#23

Post by browningstreet »

ethanpil wrote: post #13

What's Google's business case for releasing open models? Don't get me wrong, I am grateful and appreciative of these releases. I'm trying to understand how it fits into their bigger picture as a for profit company? Are they not helping competitors build on the novel technology they have developed? Is it simply goodwill and/or marketing? Or am I missing something strategic?

This won't replace commercially viable, revenue generating alternatives of their own devising, but it does enable development activity and initiate conversations with enterprises who start with this model but want to do slightly more.

That's my experience right now... my company is all in on a plethora of platform products. Also, Microsoft just yesterday said their goal was "Unmetered intelligence". There's a lot of things that can be enabled by small local models, and those things are part of stacks that can generate revenue in other layers.

Re: Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model

#24

Post by superchicken099 »

ethanpil wrote: post #13

What's Google's business case for releasing open models? Don't get me wrong, I am grateful and appreciative of these releases. I'm trying to understand how it fits into their bigger picture as a for profit company? Are they not helping competitors build on the novel technology they have developed? Is it simply goodwill and/or marketing? Or am I missing something strategic?

Gemma overtakes and kills real open-source AI projects, pushing people who would support them towards enterprises like Google

Re: Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model

#25

Post by CuriouslyC »

ethanpil wrote: post #13

What's Google's business case for releasing open models? Don't get me wrong, I am grateful and appreciative of these releases. I'm trying to understand how it fits into their bigger picture as a for profit company? Are they not helping competitors build on the novel technology they have developed? Is it simply goodwill and/or marketing? Or am I missing something strategic?

They're trying to capture the segment of the market that wants to control the model, with the intent of getting you to run them on Vertex.

Re: Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model

#26

Post by accountrequired »

ethanpil wrote: post #13

What's Google's business case for releasing open models? Don't get me wrong, I am grateful and appreciative of these releases. I'm trying to understand how it fits into their bigger picture as a for profit company? Are they not helping competitors build on the novel technology they have developed? Is it simply goodwill and/or marketing? Or am I missing something strategic?

edge compute

Re: Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model

#27

Post by ppeetteerr »

ethanpil wrote: post #13

What's Google's business case for releasing open models? Don't get me wrong, I am grateful and appreciative of these releases. I'm trying to understand how it fits into their bigger picture as a for profit company? Are they not helping competitors build on the novel technology they have developed? Is it simply goodwill and/or marketing? Or am I missing something strategic?

Isn't Apple about to license some variation of this from google for on-device AI? Maybe it’s their sales pitch to Apple and then they will lock it down.

Re: Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model

#28

Post by dwa3592 »

This is a pretty good update. The demo video is a bit funny though - the tester asks to turn the release into bullet points. okay, the model obliges. then the tester says draft an email with this content. BAM! the LLM turns the content from bullets to passages even though it was not asked and it undid the last good thing that it did. i am not sure if it's an email etiquette to not put bullets in the email.

Re: Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model

#29

Post by seba_dos1 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #11
nickandbro wrote: post #3

Wow Google is becoming the new pre Llama 4 Meta when it comes to releasing open weights models.

I dunno, feels a bit unfair to companies that actually do FOSS releases (Gemma 4 being released under Apache 2.0 license) to compare them to a company that never done any FOSS releases, and mostly done proprietary "available to download" releases.

Note that a binary released under Apache 2.0 license does not yet make it FOSS.

Re: Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model

#30

Post by rootusrootus »

ethanpil wrote: post #13

What's Google's business case for releasing open models? Don't get me wrong, I am grateful and appreciative of these releases. I'm trying to understand how it fits into their bigger picture as a for profit company? Are they not helping competitors build on the novel technology they have developed? Is it simply goodwill and/or marketing? Or am I missing something strategic?

Neutering OpenAI and Anthropic would be my guess. Commoditized LLMs won't hurt Google nearly as much as it hurts the LLM-only companies, and so accelerating the inevitable just helps knock out potential future competition in areas where Google -does- make a lot of money now.
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