I’m kind of new to local AI and wondering what’s the move here? Are they trying to pull off a chrome/android situation? Obviously I don’t trust any of these gafam giants but I would be really interested in running a local LLM on my M1 max (briefly used deepseek last year). My use case would be mostly chat functions to help with academic and text analysis tasks (don’t worry I don’t just blindly trust LLMs, I know what I’m doing), so recommendations are welcome.
Since you posted this last, Google did the dirty and U2’ed Gemini into chrome without user’s permission.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/chrome-is-quietly-downloading-4gb-ai-model-without-your-permission
So, “positioning and walled garden” rather than “for the good of all man kind” seems to be the play here. ICBW and YMMV.
Yep, the usual google shit. Wasn’t expecting it to happen that fast though.
Don’tBe Evil
Probably because they play the same game as Mark Zuckerberg, the Chinese, to some degree OpenAI… They all release open-weights models.
They’ll generate some hype for their company that way, so it’s advertising. They build good will. They undercut the competition. Or make it clear how they outperform them. Maybe they get some more investor money if they do expand to the local models market. I bet there’s a million reason why it makes sense from a business perspective.
The same reason they made Android open source. To look good (Hey we aren’t like the other guys. We support open source!) and to bring in outside ideas, input, and work until they close off every avenue and it’s open in name only.
Yeah, I’m thinking they want phone devs to start adding their models to android and create a similar situation where it becomes so integrated that it’s almost impossible to get rid off. Like they did with chromium, where most browser are now stuck with it and they can change the rules whenever they want.
It’s called commoditizing your complements. It’s a complex strategy which Google has done before with Android and Chrome. They’re masters at it.
These gemma models are small enough to run on your laptop or phone. They’ll be bundling them with phones and Chromebooks anyway.
Might as well get some goodwill and let the horses run free before someone extracts them from the edge device anyway.
It can give them some plausible deniability if they just ship them off as tech-previews. I’m thinking for when that taking kitty app starts feeding into your delusions and telling you to hurt people.
Prophetic since a week later people found Google pushing AI secretly on Google Chrome. Hexavalent chrome is banned, why can’t chrome be banned?
I’ll further prophesize that we’ll start seeing mixed on-device and cloud calling. Cloud for heavy thinking is probably in the books right now.
Next week your local tiny gemma4 will be feeding the cloud models with predicted tokens to speed up and reduce work for gemini. It only has to get it right 66% of the time for a 2x speed-up.
A lot has been said, but to add to the list I’d say it gives them access to quite a large pool of free testers.
LLM architectures and optimization techniques change rapidly and by releasing open-weight models a lot of enthusiasts will evaluate new models for free, help implement support in inference engines, catch bugs etc. (and in turn, ofc, get a new model to run for free, so it’s at least somewhat symbiotic).
We have at least seen this quite obviously when Alibaba released Qwen3-Next, which was a somewhat undertrained but still useful model which introduced the architecture that their latest models now use “in production” (also their paid “Max” models).
deleted by creator
co-opt em, set the de-facto standards and own the “attention”
That’s what I’m suspecting too. They’re trying to pull a chrome-like situation and become some sort of standard so devs eventually are stuck with their tech and whatever bullshit “manifest” update they release.
While not impossible, there’s a lot of variables when it comes to LLMs that I don’t really see how they’d do that, especially since it’s not particularly better then the competition.
I agree. I’m thinking they are trying anything hoping it will stick because clearly, they are losing the AI race. So offering models that can run locally was their best bet. And deepseek might have just fuck their shit up a little more with V4.
Random suspicion: It is correlated to how much compute US have. That’s the only reason I can think of. I also wondered why they would do that when US tech are grabbing the global hardware. They’d like to keep control of inference in the cloud but are missing power thus lack compute. But they also benefit from a western AI ecosystem that have much more compute available. Pure guess, but maybe something like that ?
Cause no one really cares about them and Google doesn’t want to fade into obscurity in this AI race.
Marketing
https://youtu.be/sXgZhGzqPmU this guy explains it from different angles
“i know what I am doing” has been heard also from the overseer of that nuclear power plant, how was that called? Ah, Chernobyl…
Lol, you have no clue about my use of AI.
Sarcasm is such an underrated skill
I mean, sarcasm require a proper context and is definitely not always clear in written comments, especially in the era of trolls and social media shitshows.
That is true, yes, I should have added a /s that clarifies. My intention wasn’t to troll.
