🧭 AI Lineup
Gemma
by Google
Google's free, open model family. The small, downloadable cousin of Gemini, made to run on your own hardware.
FreeOpen SourceRuns Locally
The details
- Context Window
- Up to 128,000 tokens on recent versions
- Cost
- Free — open and downloadable.
- Open Source?
- Yes — open weights, free to download and run
- Input / Output
- TextImages in (some versions)
Best for
- Running a name-brand model locally
- Tinkering and learning
- Free private use
- Modest hardware
Kevin’s take
“Gemma is the open one from Google — the version you can actually download and run yourself, unlike Gemini. It's small, capable, and free. If you're experimenting with local AI and want something from a big-name lab, this is an easy place to start. Runs nicely through Ollama.”
— Kevin, formerly of IT Support
Related reading
From the AI Glossary
- Open SourceSoftware whose underlying code is made freely available for anyone to inspect, use, and modify. The idea predates AI by decades and powers much of the internet. In AI the label is used loosely, and often a bit generously: some models share everything, others share only parts and still claim it. Genuinely open AI lets people see how a tool works and run it themselves, rather than taking a company's word for it.
- Open WeightsA model whose trained internals, the weights, have been released publicly, so anyone can download and run it themselves. Meta's Llama models are a well-known example. It's not quite the same as fully open source, because the recipe and data used to build the model aren't always shared. But open weights let people run capable AI on their own machines, without sending anything to a company's servers.
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