Definition
Plain language
Google's family of open-weight smaller language models.
As stated in the literature
Google's series of open-weight language models in the few-billion-parameter range, used widely in interpretability and academic research.
Also called: Gemma-2, Gemma-3, Gemma three, Gemma-3-12B
Why it matters: Open-weight small models like Gemma are what makes most interpretability and academic AI research possible.
For example, researchers studying how transformers store factual knowledge often pick a Gemma 2B model because the weights are open and the size is manageable on a single GPU.
Heard on the show
“Across GPT-4, Llama, Mistral, and Gemma, the hedged prompts reliably got responses that were more readable — that one moves in the women-associated direction in nearly every model-and-document cell.”Episode 241 — Swapping the Name Did Nothing, But Hedging Moved Every Model