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I deeply wish Google would focus on models like Gemma. Small, powerful, open-weight models you can run on phones or regular computer hardware.

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Gemma 4 was released in April. It's a good series of multimodal models.

gemma 4 thinks joe biden is president

Small open source models shouldn't be used for world knowledge, that's not their purpose.

Why not? Seems like a cop out.

Being able to ask questions to small open models seems.... obviously useful?

Because they don't have a lot of parameters to store general Wikipedia knowledge. They're small. Use big models that have high parameter capacity to store general information. Or build a harness around the small model that searches a knowledge base/internet.

Use the right tool for the job. It's like asking why a screwdriver isn't good at sawing wood, or calling C a terrible language because it's hard to make CRUD apps with it.

I asked Gemma 4 E2B, and if you use it as a reasoning model, it will give a better answer (that it doesn't know; it was also using the date information from the prompt.)

i mean eventually then will, losing means open source, vertically integrated hardware means you can opensource and win on cost

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