Gemma 2: The Open Model for Everyone
Gemma 2, a 27B parameter model from google-deepmind, was released with innovations like 1:1 local-global attention alternation and logit soft-capping, leveraging knowledge distillation to train smaller models on over 50× the compute-optimal token quantity. The model supports multilingual and multimodal capabilities, with fine-tuning success on over 200 Indic language variants. The Open LLM Leaderboard highlights alibaba's Qwen 72B as the top model, with mistral-ai's Mixtral-8x22B-Instruct also ranking highly. Anthropic launched Claude 3.5 Sonnet, improving intelligence at mid-tier cost and speed. Research on eliminating matrix multiplication in LLMs promises significant memory savings without performance loss. *Kathleen Kenealy* and *Daniel Han* provided insights on Gemma 2's tokenizer and attention scaling respectively.