Google's Gemma AI Models Reach 150 Million Downloads

Google has announced that its Gemma AI models have surpassed 150 million downloads. This milestone was shared by Omar Sanseviero, a developer relations engineer at Google DeepMind, on X, where he also noted that developers have created more than 70,000 variants of Gemma on the AI development platform Hugging Face.

Launched in February 2024, Gemma was designed to compete with other open model families, such as Meta's Llama. The latest versions of Gemma are multimodal, capable of processing both images and text, and support over 100 languages. Google has also developed specialized versions of Gemma for specific applications, including drug discovery.

Despite the impressive download numbers, Gemma still lags behind its rival, Llama, which has achieved over 1.2 billion downloads. Both Gemma and Llama have faced criticism for their custom, non-standard licensing terms, which some developers argue complicate commercial use.