One upside to this is that it doesn't use Gemma and instead uses Gemini. So at least for Gemini Nano (apparently called XS internally by Google) it means that the weights are now de facto open and you no longer need a current Android phone to get the latest and best model in this class. This also makes it the only open American frontier-level model right now.

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HumanOstrich 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Can you provide any sources for that? I'd like to learn more about this open frontier model.

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sigmoid10 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Sources for what? The pareto frontier of LLMs? How Google is pretty much on the line with most of their LLM products? Or this particular model? For the first two you need to look for size/cost vs. accuracy charts. There are tons of them floating around. For the latter there is not much official info except what you can infer by analyzing the weights.bin file that Chrome downloads. But it does mention Gemini in there, so it seems pretty obvious that it is from their proprietary line of models.

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lxgr 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Just because it's called Gemini doesn't mean that it's somehow automatically as comparable with the frontier of small models as well, does it?

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sigmoid10 3 hours ago | parent [-]

All Gemini models sit around the frontier, especially if you go to smaller sizes. Google is actually more invested into efficiency than size unlike some of the other big providers.

	▲	lxgr 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Do you have any benchmark details on the on-device Gemini models? I haven't found a lot of public information on these.

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HumanOstrich 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sources for your claim that the model being downloaded to Android/Chrome is Gemini instead of Gemma. Other than downloading the bin file myself and analyzing it lol.

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sigmoid10 3 hours ago | parent [-]

How about Google itself?

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api

>With the Prompt API, you can send natural language requests to Gemini Nano in the browser.

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HumanOstrich 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Thanks. Looks like the current Gemini Nano is actually a separate model with the Gemma 3n architecture that has been distilled from Gemini 2.5 Flash[1].

Also, the next version of Gemini Nano will be based directly on Gemma 4 (so not distilled, not Gemini at all except for the name)[2].

So no, it's not a frontier model. Those don't run on your phone or in your browser.

[1]: https://developer.android.com/blog/posts/ml-kit-s-prompt-api...

[2]: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/04/AI-Core-De...

	▲	sigmoid10 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Oh, now I see your problem. You confused the pareto frontier with the pure scale frontier. They are very much not the same. Also, distillation is how most of these smaller models are made from the biggest models. That process largely defines the frontier along most of the curve.

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3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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