Google giving away some AI chatbot coding

SAN FRANCISCO — When Meta shared the raw computer code needed to build a chatbot last year, rival companies said Meta was releasing poorly understood and perhaps even dangerous technology into the world.

Now, in an indication that critics of sharing AI technology are losing ground to their industry peers, Google is making a similar move. Google released the computer code Wednesday that powers its online chatbot, after keeping this kind of technology concealed for many months.

Much like Meta, Google said the benefits of freely sharing the technology — called a large language model — outweighed the potential risks.

The company said in a blog post that it was releasing two AI language models that could help outside companies and independent software developers build online chatbots similar to Google’s own chatbot. Called Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B, they are not Google’s most powerful AI technologies, but the company argued that they rivaled many of the industry’s leading systems.

“We’re hoping to reengage the thirdparty developer community and make sure that” Google-based models become an industry standard for how modern AI is built, Tris Warkentin, a Google DeepMind director of product management, said in an interview.

This month, Google began charging for access to the most powerful version of Gemini. By offering the model as an online service, the company can more tightly control the technology.

Worried that AI technologies will be used to spread disinformation, hate speech and other toxic content, some companies, such as OpenAI, the maker of the online chatbot ChatGPT, have become increasingly secretive about the methods and software that underpin their products.

But others, such as Meta and French startup Mistral, have argued that freely sharing code — called open sourcing — is the safer approach because it allows outsiders to identify problems with the technology and suggest solutions.