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Gemma 3 Technical Report [pdf]

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Re: Gemma 3 Technical Report [pdf]

#91

> They are designed to help prevent our models from generating harmful content, i.e., > [...] > Sexually explicit content Dear tech companies. Sexually explicit content is not harmful. Why are you all run by puritans? I don't even want to make edgy porn, I just want to be treated like an adult.

There are very few pro-porn voices in the corporate, tie-wearing environments that have the money to train new LLMs from scratch.

Oh, there are loads of porn enjoyers working in such companies - but traditional professionalism means you leave the porn at home during the work day. It is, after all, NSFW.

So at the meeting where censorship decisions were being made, even a weak argument for censoring explicit content will be accepted unopposed.

Re: Gemma 3 Technical Report [pdf]

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is treating this like corps have anything to gain from an open uncensored model. Switch your view and give me a single argument for it? That random nerds on HN stop jerking each other about what „open“ means? You are just not their target group. Having this discussion every time no matter if the model released is censored or not is just insanity. Bring new arguments or don’t use the models you don’t like. Th…

>You are just not their target group. Having this discussion every time no matter if the model released is censored or not is just insanit Who is their target group for small local models that benchmark inferiorly to their proprietary solution (Gemini 2.0) then, if not hobbyists and researchers?

>> The press and decision makers without technical knowledge are the target group, it doesn’t matter if it’s used in production or not. They need a locally deployable model to keep up with enterprises that are to risk averse to put their data into the cloud and also don’t care that their shitty homegrown ChatGPT replacement barely works. It’s a checkbox.

Re: Gemma 3 Technical Report [pdf]

#93
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is treating this like corps have anything to gain from an open uncensored model. Switch your view and give me a single argument for it? That random nerds on HN stop jerking each other about what „open“ means? You are just not their target group. Having this discussion every time no matter if the model released is censored or not is just insanity. Bring new arguments or don’t use the models you don’t like. Th…

The argument is that it simply improves the product. For instance, Github Copilot is apparently refusing to do anything with variable names like "trans" and anything related to sex or gender, regardless of the intended meaning. That is a serious flaw and makes the product less useful. See this: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/72603

You don’t know if the censorship is in the model or the system prompt.

Re: Gemma 3 Technical Report [pdf]

#94

> They are designed to help prevent our models from generating harmful content, i.e., > [...] > Sexually explicit content Dear tech companies. Sexually explicit content is not harmful. Why are you all run by puritans? I don't even want to make edgy porn, I just want to be treated like an adult.

It's harmful in that there exists a significant and vocal subset of users who does not wish to see that content or does not wish their children to do so. It's easier to teach your model never to produce that kind of content than to teach it to perfectly distinguish whether this user should see that content or not. TV channels are barred from broadcasting this kind of content for similar reasons. Sure, there are alway…

>It's harmful in that there exists a significant and vocal subset of users who does not wish to see that content or does not wish their children to do so

It's hard to think of a scenario where there's a child technical enough to run Gemma 3 locally but somehow unable to access any other written erotica. Project Gutenberg is full of erotic textual content and I haven't heard of anyone calling for that to be banned.

>Then there are the non-chat-gpt-app use cases (like customer support chatbots, automatic summarization etc), for which unprompted erotica is highly inappropriate. Those are the "business travelers" of AI, not the first thing one thinks of when talking about who uses AI models, but extremely important nonetheless.

And how many of these are going to be using Gemma, when Gemini over the API is cheaper, faster and easier to use?

Re: Gemma 3 Technical Report [pdf]

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, been using Gemma 2 a lot at home as it still holds up very well and the 9B version runs great on my 2080Ti. Strong prompt adherence coupled with overall capability makes it very useful. Looking forward to trying Gemma 3. I have some dumb questions though, might as well ask. How do you decide on the model sizes? And how do you train them? Independently or are they related somehow?

Picking model sizes is not an exact science. We look for sizes that will fit quantized on different categories on devices (e.g., low-end and high-end smartphone, laptops and 16GB GPUs, and bigger GPUs/TPUs). We also want the ratio of model width to depth (number of layers) to be consistently around 90, which we found works best. The models are trained with distillation from a bigger teacher. We train them independent…

Thanks again, very interesting.

One unexpected (to me) use-case appeared not long ago when I found myself without internet but wanting to fix some non-standard Linux configuration issue. As a Windows guy I tend to web search such things, but local LLM to the rescue!

Even smaller models like Gemma 2 9B has enough compressed knowledge that it managed to help me quickly solve my issue.

This got me thinking how such smaller, but very capable models might be a game-changer in communities where internet might not be available or too expensive for continuous use. It's almost like having a portion of the internet in a box, just add electricity.

Re: Gemma 3 Technical Report [pdf]

#96
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to get more puritanical than "if you disagree with my opinion then you're morally repulsive". Not to mention that your argument implies that all traces of sex ought to be scrubbed from the entire Internet ? And that that conclusion is the only moral one?

Hard to get more perverse than “kids should have access to sexually explicit material at all times in any medium. If that sounds fucked up when I say it like that, consider what assumptions you’re making, because that’s literally YOUR argument here.

> that’s literally YOUR argument here

No, that's the opposite of yours.

Re: Gemma 3 Technical Report [pdf]

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's harmful in that there exists a significant and vocal subset of users who does not wish to see that content or does not wish their children to do so. It's easier to teach your model never to produce that kind of content than to teach it to perfectly distinguish whether this user should see that content or not. TV channels are barred from broadcasting this kind of content for similar reasons. Sure, there are alway…

>It's harmful in that there exists a significant and vocal subset of users who does not wish to see that content or does not wish their children to do so It's hard to think of a scenario where there's a child technical enough to run Gemma 3 locally but somehow unable to access any other written erotica. Project Gutenberg is full of erotic textual content and I haven't heard of anyone calling for that to be banned. >T…

More than you think, particularly outside the US.

Companies and government organizations who have sensitive data are still unwilling to use these models over any API they don't host themselves.

I work in this space in the EU, and this is absolutely a problem.

Re: Gemma 3 Technical Report [pdf]

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's harmful in that there exists a significant and vocal subset of users who does not wish to see that content or does not wish their children to do so. It's easier to teach your model never to produce that kind of content than to teach it to perfectly distinguish whether this user should see that content or not. TV channels are barred from broadcasting this kind of content for similar reasons. Sure, there are alway…

>It's harmful in that there exists a significant and vocal subset of users who does not wish to see that content or does not wish their children to do so It's hard to think of a scenario where there's a child technical enough to run Gemma 3 locally but somehow unable to access any other written erotica. Project Gutenberg is full of erotic textual content and I haven't heard of anyone calling for that to be banned. >T…

> It's hard to think of a scenario where there's a child technical enough to run Gemma 3 locally but somehow unable to access any other written erotica.

The reason you're struggling to understand is that you're thinking about this logically.

Adult content is obviously freely available to any child or adult with minimum technical skills. What makes LLMs different is that it's "the new thing" and people respond differently to "the new thing".

Re: Gemma 3 Technical Report [pdf]

#100
post #86

> The Gemma 3 models are multimodal—processing text and images—and feature a 128K context window with support for over 140 languages. I'm curious as a multilingual person: would a single language (english/spanish/cantonese) allow for the model to be bigger and still fit in a single GPU?

In the context of another multilingual model I've heard that the majority of its training was in mainly one language, as that training seems to be applicable to languages added later too. To me that sounds plausible given adding a new language would mean vocabulary & grammar while the understanding of concepts should already be there.

Intuitively adding 140 languages instead of e.g. the 5 most common would otherwise be in conflict with making a small model that fits a single GPU.

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