Google Is Giving Away Some of the A.I. That Powers Chatbots

"Like Meta, the company opened access to its technology to outside programmers, but kept its most powerful system under wraps.

When Meta shared the raw computer code needed to build a chatbot last year, rival companies said Meta was releasing poorly understood and perhaps even dangerous technology into the world.

Now, in an indication that critics of sharing A.I. technology are losing ground to their industry peers, Google is making a similar move. Google released the computer code that powers its online chatbot on Wednesday, after keeping this kind of technology concealed for many months.

Much like Meta, Google said the benefits of freely sharing the technology — called a large language model — outweighed the potential risks.

The company said in a blog post that it was releasing two A.I. language models that could help outside companies and independent software developers build online chatbots similar to Google’s own chatbot. Called Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B, they [1] are not Google’s most powerful A.I. technologies, but the company argued that they rivaled many of the industry’s leading systems.

“We’re hoping to re-engage the third-party developer community and make sure that” Google-based models become an industry standard for how modern A.I. is built, Tris Warkentin, a Google DeepMind director of product management, said in an interview.

Google said it had no current plans to release its flagship A.I. model, Gemini, for free. Because it is more effective, Gemini could also cause more harm."

1. More description here.