gemma-2-27b

This is a serious model. I could write a speculative post about each of the sections in the report. In summary, it evaluated on ChatBotArena well, is trained on LMSYS data, is distilled similarly to Gemini (probably, as discussed in my recent post), uses model merging during fine-tuning, uses an order of magnitude larger reward model for RLHF (>100B parameters), uses synthetic and human data, and is a reasonable size for inference on one 80GB memory GPU. Read more in the technical report here.

Otherwise, I seriously expect future Gemma models to replace a lot of Llama models in workflows. Google shows every intention of putting a lot of weight behind these, which is fantastic to see. Hopefully it can continue.
For more on Gemma 2, see this post from HuggingFace.