The Alphabet subsidiary said individuals and businesses can build AI software based on its new family of "open models" called Gemma, for free.
The models are "optimized" for Google Cloud, where first-time cloud customers using them get $300 in credits, the company said.
With the announcement, Google did not make its bigger, premier models known as Gemini open, unlike Gemma.
It said the Gemma models are sized at two billion or seven billion parameters – or the number of different values that an algorithm takes into account to generate output.
Meta’s Llama 2 models range from seven to 70 billion parameters in size.
Google has not disclosed the size of its largest Gemini models. For comparison, OpenAI’s GPT-3 model announced in 2020 had 175 billion parameters.