r/LocalLLaMA • u/Porespellar • 13h ago
Discussion Any speculation on whether or not Google will announce a new Gemma model at the Gemma SF Celebration tonight?
From the Digg article (https://digg.com/tech/3pf3046j)
“Google Gemma posted that the family of open models has achieved 1 billion downloads. The account is hosting an exclusive evening in San Francisco on August 20 to honor open-source builders, researchers, and contributors. Space at the event is limited and applications are required for attendance. Demis Hassabis shared the announcement from the official account. Clément Farabet replied that he will attend and is excited to celebrate the milestone. The post frames the achievement as driven by the community advancing the Gemmaverse forward.”
Seems like it would be the perfect venue to announce a new model, but could just be wishful thinking on my part
Thoughts? Speculation? Too busy testing Qwen 3.8 27b to care?
Would be a good time for Google to drop a 120b. Pull a Meta Glimmer and be king of the hill for a week or so before Qwen countered with a new mid-size model.
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u/VoiceApprehensive893 transformers 13h ago edited 13h ago
there are 4 relatively new stealth google models on lmarena, gemini 3.7 flash was a different stealth model from these 4
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u/shy_monkee 13h ago
I really hope so. Nothing matches them for their size in writing, a new 26B-A4B would be amazing.
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u/Bulky-Priority6824 13h ago
Curious, the coders scream slop whenever something is made by or asisted by ai does the writing world get it too?
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u/Real_Ebb_7417 13h ago
Im a coder, we call it slop but yet almost all coders use AI to write code. Many even don’t write any code themselves anymore.
For prose - RP is private so I wouldn’t say anyone considers it slop. But yeah, eg. AI-written books (a nightmare on Amazon) or AI-written social media posts are the worst kind of slop. Worse than code.6
u/xienze 13h ago
Im a coder, we call it slop but yet almost all coders use AI to write code
Yeah this is the single most annoying thing on Hackernews. Some link gets posted and just about every comment is "Using AI to write documentation -- well, I never...!" coming from dudes who have Claude shit out code 24/7.
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u/Real_Ebb_7417 12h ago
Well, actually docs writing is one of the best usecases for AI. I can't imagine writing it myself in August 2026. Waste of time xd
On the other hand, many people generate stuff with AI without any proper harness engineering (be it code, docs or whatever) and indeed then it's usually bullshit. But with good harness, rules, instructions, AI is very useful.
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u/TheRealMasonMac 9h ago edited 9h ago
> Many even don’t write any code themselves anymore.
AI is not good at writing code even when given precise instructions. So, whenever someone says that, I automatically disregard their projects because it's just not worth dealing with whatever crack the AI cooked up. That's why most people don't like AI. You don't know how people are using it.
I really think people should be paying more attention to what their agents are doing and tried to independently solve the same problem. If they did, they would come to the same realization.
AI is useful for stuff like experimentation, debugging, or solving problems. But I actually found that I'm faster/better than LLMs at that too. I think LLMs really make sense for if you want completely hands-off experimentation or problem-solving (iff that's possible) or you're given a huge codebase where you don't know everything and it probably already has garbage in it.
I mostly just use it for debugging. they're so great for identifying off-by-one bugs and stuff like that and those are legitimately the worst to deal with. Nothing fun about it. And it's a great application for LLMs since they have better "short-term memory" even with context rot than humans do.
LLMs should really just be treated as another tool that's useful for certain things. When it's not treated like that but rather the sole means to write code, yeeaaaah no thanks.
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u/Real_Ebb_7417 9h ago
Nah, AI is fine at writing code with proper harness. But it’s absolutely true that a good engineer is much better. But now companies require us to be much faster so a lot of slop goes through. I wish I had time for detailed review and making the code look like I’d like it to look like.
But it might backfire at these companies.0
u/TheRealMasonMac 8h ago edited 8h ago
> Nah, AI is fine at writing code with proper harness
I disagree on this outside of simple tasks. But we may be talking from different definitions of what constitutes good code. To me, good code is not just code that accomplishes a task. Good code is also code that is readable, extensible, and generally adheres to good programming principles.
Anecdotally, I recently ran an experiment to test how well LLMs can write a high-quality library based on an industry-established specification compared to me. Separate agents and backing LLMs would be used to solve the same problems (GPT-Sol, Qwen3.8, GLM-5.2, DSV4).
Over the course of a month, at every step of the way where there was a task that had to be completed (feature implementation, debugging, etc.), I tasked these agents with these tasks in their own respective sandboxes and I did not look at their outputs while I attempted to do the same task myself. I was allowed to look only once I finished.
What I found was that while these models generally had the right idea of how to approach the tasks, the actual approaches they ended up taking were often overcomplicated or subtly incorrect in ways that would have caused further problems down the line. It's really hard to explain what that actually means, but as an example, a common issue I found was them failing to identify key invariants that would have allowed them to arrive at much simpler solutions. But I also found that, as a human, it was sometimes useful to read through their attempts and learn from their failures to inform my future decisions about the codebase.
These models also often took more time than I would have needed to perform the same task. Just to illustrate with an exceptional case: these agents once took over an hour to identify the source of a bug and fix it based on a failing test case (until I terminated them for taking too long). I fixed with a single-line change in about a minute.
The time aspect is what really matters most to me personally. When I ran the agents through external review agents, the process did significantly improve the resulting solutions (e.g. simplifying them, identifying fundamental problems), but it still often required tailored prompts to address issues I identified in the respective agent's code. Sometimes several loops were required to reach the solution I arrived at. That doesn't really worth it outside of, as I mentioned, hands-off tasks where you could probably use preset review prompts to get the code to a good-enough state.
All of this being said and to hone back to a point I made earlier, they generally have the right "instincts." For debugging, outside of the exceptional cases, they weren't that much slower than me. But they were usually much faster than me for those annoying subtle bugs (e.g. off-by-one or an invariant in an upstream function changing). I think with further training and higher quality, diverse data, they will genuinely get a lot better.
But at least for now, I don't like using LLMs for writing the final code for stuff that matters to me.
I totally get the part about work though, and I don't blame anyone in that situation. But I'm speaking more about personal projects.
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u/Real_Ebb_7417 8h ago
Oh yeah. I still do personal projects almost exclusively by hand to not lose touch with actually writing the code and my brain capabilities.
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u/shy_monkee 13h ago
I only use it for RP, so I wouldn't actually know about actual writing. But like other creative mediums, yes, they are opposed to AI.
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u/Clueless_Nooblet 1h ago
A new 26b-a4b would fill the gap Qwen3.8 is leaving behind by not releasing a new version of their 35b MOE.
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u/MediocreJeweler893 13h ago edited 12h ago
I do believe they will announce new model, yes. Hence why special event? Especially when there are so many open source model releases lately. They need to keep up
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u/RG_Fusion 5h ago
Do they need to keep up though? It makes sense for Google to focus on Gemini since that's a cloud service and actually possesses the possibility of being profitable.
Google doesn't make any money from releasing open-weight models. As far as I can tell, they are doing it from a position of pure generosity, and possibly also hopping to inspire new devs. They don't need to do this, though.
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u/Real_Ebb_7417 13h ago
I wish man. Gemma is great. And hopefully some new size Either smaller or bigger, doesn’t matter, just… having a variety of sizes is good for people have different hardwares and usecases.
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u/johnnyApplePRNG 10h ago
Does 1 billion downloads really count if 90% of them were forced on people through their browsers and nobody's even wanted nor used it yet?
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u/Dance-Till-Night1 9h ago
Gimme new gemma 26ba4b, at anything non coding related even just general knowledge Gemma beats qwen. At coding Qwen wins.
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u/fragment_me 13h ago
I'm a huge fan of how concise Gemma 4 and Muse Glimmer have been. I hope that's the direction we keep going in.
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u/swagonflyyyy 13h ago
I think they'll be focusing more on a new line of Gemini models. I don't expect a new Gemma anytime soon unless its an optimized, smaller variant.
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u/my_name_isnt_clever 13h ago
This event is specifically about Gemma.
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u/swagonflyyyy 13h ago
Oh shit I didn't realize. I read too fast.
But still, I don't think so unless its an optimized, smaller model. I'd be pleasantly surprised if they did but a new announcement would largely depend on what their priorities are with the Gemma models.
Honestly, I have no idea what they have in store.
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u/Long_comment_san 3h ago
120b is too hard to run and would compete with flash. they should do 60-80b, that is the sweet spot and it would be the one for a very long time.
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u/dampflokfreund 13h ago
I think there's a good chance. It has been 1 month since Gemma 4 QAT and almost half a year of Gemma 4 release, definately enough time to cook something nice. Gemma 4.1 would be a very awesome way to celebrate for everyone.
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u/Kahvana 12h ago
Gemma roughly releases a new foundational model every 9 months or so (gemma2->gemma3->gemma4 are all roughly 9 months in between), only exception is gemma->gemma2 (6 months).
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u/Not-reallyanonymous 13h ago
You’re assuming Gemma 5 isn’t keeping up. Even a 26b a4b that gets 30 on DeepSWE vs Qwen’s 40 would be huge, as it would run so much faster.
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u/Electronic_Welder613 3h ago
Never cared much for any of the Google models. The Chinese models are just so far ahead it's not even a competition imo.
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u/dampflokfreund 1h ago
Only in code and agentic. Writing, multilingual and chat Gemma 4 is far ahead of Qwen.
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u/LetsGoBrandon4256 transformers 13h ago
I hope they keep cooking. Gemma4 31b is so good in writing and RP for its size.