Google PaLM 2 Open Source Push
What happened on March 25th is relatively simple: someone in the open-source AI community got impatient. A post appeared on LocalLLaMA arguing that Google should release PaLM 2 Gecko — its smallest, most deployable model variant — under an open licence, the same way it handled Gemma. A few hours later, a second post landed with roughly the same argument, only less patient in its phrasing. The frustration is genuine and the logic is coherent: Google has already demonstrated willingness to open-source capable models, Gecko sits at a size that would run on consumer hardware, and the community that has been evangelising Gemma would almost certainly do the same promotional work for Gecko. This is not a rumour that something is happening. It is a wish that something would.
If confirmed — if Google were actually moving toward open-sourcing PaLM 2 Gecko — the implications would be real and worth thinking through. Gecko is designed for on-device efficiency, which means releasing it would immediately put a Google-grade model into the hands of developers building local applications, privacy-first tools, and embedded systems that cannot depend on an API call. That is the segment where Meta's smaller Llama models have been quietly dominant. Google handing Gecko to the open-source community would compress that advantage and give Google a foothold in a conversation it has largely been absent from. The second-order effect is subtler: it would signal that Google views open weights as a distribution strategy rather than a concession, which would change how the rest of the industry reads its competitive posture.
Watch for any official Google AI or Google DeepMind communication referencing Gecko's licensing status, or any Hugging Face repository activity associated with a PaLM 2 variant — either would move this story from community wishlist to actual news.
<table> <tr><td> <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1tr5cnn/if_gemma_4_is_opensource_can_we_ask_google_to/"> <img alt="If Gemma 4 is open-source, can we ask
<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>Hear me out. The model is deprecated. It's not making OpenAI money anymore. Nobody is actively building new products on it. It's basically a
<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>Anyone thought about this? What do you think needs to happen for them to release the old weights? I’d love to see models like Gemini-2.5, OAI o3,
<table> <tr><td> <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1urxzno/google_should_open_source_gemini_all_of_it/"> <img alt="Google Should Open Source Gemini. All of
  submitted by   <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/dev_is_active"> /u/dev_is_active </a> <br /> <span><a
<table> <tr><td> <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1sskmhv/recent_open_models_from_last_6_months_nov_2025/"> <img alt="Recent Open models from last 6 Months -
<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>Benchmark: 58.4 vs 56.7 (beats GPT-5.4)</p> <p>License: Fully open (Apache 2.0) </p> <p>What it actually does: Runs 8-hour fully autonomous agent
<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>Just putting together a quick list of the new <strong>open-source physical AI / robotics models</strong> from <strong>NVIDIA GTC
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