Thursday, 14th August 2025
Introducing Gemma 3 270M: The compact model for hyper-efficient AI (via) New from Google:
Gemma 3 270M, a compact, 270-million parameter model designed from the ground up for task-specific fine-tuning with strong instruction-following and text structuring capabilities already trained in.
This model is tiny. The version I tried was the LM Studio GGUF one, a 241MB download.
It works! You can say "hi" to it and ask it very basic questions like "What is the capital of France".
I tried "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" about a dozen times and didn't once get back an SVG that was more than just a blank square... but at one point it did decide to write me this poem instead, which was nice:
+-----------------------+
| Pelican Riding Bike |
+-----------------------+
| This is the cat! |
| He's got big wings and a happy tail. |
| He loves to ride his bike! |
+-----------------------+
| Bike lights are shining bright. |
| He's got a shiny top, too! |
| He's ready for adventure! |
+-----------------------+
That's not really the point though. The Gemma 3 team make it very clear that the goal of this model is to support fine-tuning: a model this tiny is never going to be useful for general purpose LLM tasks, but given the right fine-tuning data it should be able to specialize for all sorts of things:
In engineering, success is defined by efficiency, not just raw power. You wouldn't use a sledgehammer to hang a picture frame. The same principle applies to building with AI.
Gemma 3 270M embodies this "right tool for the job" philosophy. It's a high-quality foundation model that follows instructions well out of the box, and its true power is unlocked through fine-tuning. Once specialized, it can execute tasks like text classification and data extraction with remarkable accuracy, speed, and cost-effectiveness. By starting with a compact, capable model, you can build production systems that are lean, fast, and dramatically cheaper to operate.
Here's their tutorial on Full Model Fine-Tune using Hugging Face Transformers, which I have not yet attempted to follow.
I imagine this model will be particularly fun to play with directly in a browser using transformers.js.
Update: It is! Here's a bedtime story generator using Transformers.js (requires WebGPU, so Chrome-like browsers only). Here's the source code for that demo.
NERD HARDER! is the answer every time a politician gets a technological idée-fixe about how to solve a social problem by creating a technology that can't exist. It's the answer that EU politicians who backed the catastrophic proposal to require copyright filters for all user-generated content came up with, when faced with objections that these filters would block billions of legitimate acts of speech [...]
When politicians seize on a technological impossibility as a technological necessity, they flail about and desperately latch onto scholarly work that they can brandish as evidence that their idea could be accomplished. [...]
That's just happened, and in relation to one of the scariest, most destructive NERD HARDER! tech policies ever to be assayed (a stiff competition). I'm talking about the UK Online Safety Act, which imposes a duty on websites to verify the age of people they communicate with before serving them anything that could be construed as child-inappropriate (a category that includes, e.g., much of Wikipedia)
— Cory Doctorow, "Privacy preserving age verification" is bullshit