Gemma models overview

Gemma is a family of lightweight, state-of-the-art open models built from the same research and technology used to create the Gemini models. Developed by Google DeepMind and other teams across Google, Gemma is named after the Latin gemma, meaning precious stone. The Gemma model weights are supported by developer tools that promote innovation, collaboration, and the responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI).

The Gemma models are available to run in your applications and on your hardware, mobile devices, or hosted services. You can also customize these models using tuning techniques so that they excel at performing specific tasks that matter to you and your users. Gemma models draw inspiration and technological lineage from the Gemini family of models, and are made for the AI development community to extend and take further.

Ready to begin? Get started with Gemma models!

Pretrained and instruction tuned models

You can modify the behavior of Gemma models with additional training so the model performs better on specific tasks. This process is called model tuning, and while this technique improves the ability of a model to perform targeted tasks, it can also cause the model to become worse at other tasks. For this reason, Gemma models are available in both instruction tuned and pretrained versions:

  • Instruction tuned (IT) - These versions of the model are trained with human language interactions and can respond to conversational input, similar to a chat bot.
  • Pretrained (PT) - These versions of the model are not trained on any specific tasks or instructions beyond the Gemma core data training set. You should not deploy these models in applications without performing some tuning.

Next Steps

Start your journey building applications with Gemma with the Get started with Gemma guide.