It's multilingual. Genuinely. Compared my results with some people on reddit and the consensus is that the 27B is near perfect in a few obscure languages and likely perfect in most common ones. The 9B is not as good but it's still coherent enough to use in a pinch.
It's literally the first omni-translation tool that actually works that you can run offline at home. I'm amazed that Google mentioned absolutely nothing about this in their paper.
Wow, that's very impressive and indeed a game changer. I've previously had trouble with various Scandinavian languages, but last I checked with was Llama 2 and I kind of gave up on it. I had expected we were going to need special purpose small models for these uses as a crutch, like SW-GPT3.
So I guess Gemma 2 is going to become Gemini 2.0 in their truly large and closed variants then? Or is it the open version of Gemini 1.5?
In my experience, smaller models tend to do well on benchmarks and fail at generalization. Phi-2 comes to mind.