Google’s openly available Gemma collection of AI models has reached a milestone: over 150 million downloads. Omar Sanseviero, a developer relations engineer at Google DeepMind, announced the figure on X over the weekend, also revealing that developers have created more than 70,000 variants of Gemma on the AI dev platform Hugging Face.
Google launched Gemma in February 2024, aiming to compete with other “open” model families like Meta’s Llama. The latest Gemma releases are multimodal, meaning that they can work with images as well as text, and support over 100 languages. Google has also created versions of Gemma fine-tuned for particular applications, like drug discovery.
While 140 million downloads in roughly a year is a head-turning metric, Gemma trails far behind Llama, perhaps its chief rival, which surpassed 1.2 billion downloads in late April.
Worth noting is that Gemma, as well as Llama, has been criticized for custom, non-standard licensing terms, which some devs say have made using the models commercially a risky proposition.
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