Gemma 3 270M: The compact model for hyper-efficient AI

Summary

The last few months have been an exciting time for the Gemma family of open models. We introduced Gemma 3 and Gemma 3 QAT, delivering state-of-the-art performance for single cloud and desktop accelerators. Then, we announced the full release of Gemma 3n, a mobile-first architecture bringing powerful, real-time multimodal AI directly to edge devices. Our goal has been to provide useful tools for developers to build with AI, and we continue to be amazed by the vibrant Gemmaverse you are helping create, celebrating together as downloads surpassed 200 million last week.Today, we're adding a new, highly specialized tool to the Gemma 3 toolkit: 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. Gemma 3 270M brings strong instruction-following capabilities to a small-footprint model. As shown by the IFEval benchmark (which tests a model's ability to follow verifiable instructions), it establishes a new level of performance for its size, making sophisticated AI capabilities more accessible for on-device and research applications. Core capabilities of Gemma 3 270MCompact and capable architecture: Our new model has a total of 270 million parameters: 170 million embedding parameters due to a large vocabulary size and 100 million for our transformer blocks. Thanks to the large vocabulary of 256k tokens, the model can handle specific and rare tokens, making it a strong base model to be further fine-tuned in specific domains and languages.Extreme energy efficiency: A key advantage of Gemma 3 270M is its low power consumption. Internal tests on a Pixel 9 Pro SoC show the INT4-quantized model used just 0.75% of the battery for 25 conversations, making it our most power-efficient Gemma model.Instruction following: An instruction-tuned model is released alongside a pre-trained checkpoint. While this model is not designed for complex conve...