At I/O Connect in Berlin, Google unveiled its Gemma 2 model series, which will be available to researchers and developers through Vertex AI starting next month. The model will be available in two versions: with 9 and 27 billion parameters. The open-source models are said to be more efficient and secure than their predecessors, and outperform models twice the size in terms of overall performance. At Google I/O in May, the company showed the first benchmarks of the large version, which was also able to keep up with Meta's Llama 3 with 70 billion parameters. According to Google, the new models are aimed at developers who want to integrate AI into their apps or edge devices such as smartphones, IoT devices, and PCs.