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.
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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.
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.
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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.
Personally, I don’t think they have any kind of grand plan beyond capturing as much of the market as they can. They’ll keep using the strategies that have been effective, but I doubt they can predict what the market will do, or what ground-breaking discoveries are coming. “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.”
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.
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).
Cause no one really cares about them and Google doesn’t want to fade into obscurity in this AI race.
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 ?
