I bookmarked this comment from archerx on Hacker News in this Gemma3 post.
I have tried a lot of local models. I have 656GB of them on my computer so I have experience with a diverse array of LLMs. Gemma has been nothing to write home about and has been disappointing every single time I have used it.
Models that are worth writing home about are;
- EXAONE-3.5-7.8B-Instruct - It was excellent at taking podcast transcriptions and generating show notes and summaries.
- Rocinante-12B-v2i - Fun for stories and D&D
- Qwen2.5-Coder-14B-Instruct - Good for simple coding tasks
- OpenThinker-7B - Good and fast reasoning
- The Deepseek destills - Able to handle more complex task while still being fast
- DeepHermes-3-Llama-3-8B - A really good vLLM
- Medical-Llama3-v2 - Very interesting but be careful
- Plus more but not Gemma.