Comment by kamranjon
1 day ago
Actually the majority of Google models are open source and they also were pretty fundamental in pushing a lot of the techniques in training forward - working in the AI space I’ve read quite a few of their research papers and I really appreciate what they’ve done to share their work and also release their models under licenses that allow you to use them for commercial purposes.
"Actually the majority of Google models are open source"
That's not accurate. The Gemini family of models are all proprietary.
Google's Gemma models (which are some of the best available local models) are open weights but not technically OSI-compatible open source - they come with usage restrictions: https://ai.google.dev/gemma/terms
You’re ignoring the T5 series of models that were incredibly influential, the T5 models and their derivatives (FLAN-T5, Long-T5, ByT5, etc) have been downloaded millions of times on huggingface and are real workhorses. There are even variants still being produced within the last year or so.
A yea the Gemma series is incredible and while maybe not meeting the standards of OSI - I consider them to be pretty open as far as local models go. And it’s not just the standard Gemma variants, Google is releasing other incredible Gemma models that I don’t think people have really even caught wind of yet like MedGemma, of which the 4b variant has vision capability.
I really enjoy their contributions to the open source AI community and think it’s pretty substantial.