Google Releases Gemma 3 Family of Open-Source AI Models, Can Run on a Single GPU

Google released the Gemma 3 family of artificial intelligence (AI) models on Wednesday. Successor to the Gemma 2 series, which was introduced in August 2024, the new open-source models arrive with text and visual reasoning capabilities. The Mountain View-based tech giant said these models offer support for more than 35 languages and can be fine-tuned to offer additional support for 140 languages. Notably, the tech giant claimed that these models are optimised to run on a single GPU or Google’s Tensor processing unit (TPU).

Google Releases Gemma 3 Series AI Models

In a blog post, the tech giant detailed the new small language models (SLMs), highlighting that these were built using the same technology as the company’s flagship Gemini 2.0 models. The Gemma series is known for being open-source and offering on-device performance. Google revealed that so far, the Gemma models have been downloaded more than 100 million times and have been used to create more than 60,000 variants.

The tech giant claimed that Gemma outperforms Meta’s Llama-405B, DeepSeek-V3, OpenAI’s o3-mini AI models on the LMArena’s leaderboard. These models are available in four sizes — 1B, 4B, 12B, and 27B parameters. They can be run on a single GPU or TPU, the company claimed.

Gemma 3 series offers advanced text and visual reasoning capabilities, and can analyse images, text, and short videos. The AI models offer a context window of 1,28,000 tokens. The models also offer function calling support, which will allow developers to build agentic capabilities in the apps and software they create.

Google said that the AI models were developed using careful risk assessment. The company claimed that it enforced internal safety policies via fine-tuning and benchmark evaluations. The models were also tested using more capable models. The model displayed a low risk level, the company claimed.

In addition to Gemma 3 series, the company also launched ShieldGemma 2, a 4B parameter image safety checker, that ensures that the AI models do not generate content with dangerous, sexually explicit, or violent content. Developers have also been given the option to further customise ShieldGemma to enhance the safety parameters. Gemma 3 family of AI models can be downloaded via Google’s Hugging Face listing or on Kaggle.