Maximilian: So where do you find those open models?
And with that, I of course mean the ones I just described,
but maybe also others
because it's of course not just these four providers
that do publish open Large Language Models.
Well, of course if you do want
to learn more about Meta's Llama models
or Google's Gemma models,
their official websites are a great place to go.
But to get a general overview of available models
and to explore available models
and also find new models,
which you maybe haven't heard about before,
Hugging Face is the defacto standard place to go.
Huggingface.co is a website
that's all about open AI models in the end.
They have a models catalog
where all the big players like Meta, Google,
but also everybody else that's creating AI models,
publishes those models or lists those models.
So in that model catalog, you'll find a plethora
of open Large Language and also other AI models.
You will, for example,
find information about Google's Gemma models in there,
about the Qwen model,
which is another popular open model,
about Deepseek models,
Microsoft's open models,
and of course also Meta's Llama models, for example.
And again, many, many more.
Now in this model catalog, you can sort by trending
or by most downloads, to also play around
with the models most other people's maybe using.
You can also sort based on recency
to find out which new models have been published
or what the most liked models are.
It's also worth noting
that Hugging Face is not just
about Large Language Models, though.
You can filter for which kind
of AI model you are interested in.
You, for example, can also explore computer vision models
that are able to analyze images
or models that are able to generate images
or models that can handle audio.
So there's a broad variety
of models listed here in this course,
however, will focus on the Large Language Models,
which are arguably
the most popular open models being used out there.
And what's really great about Hugging Face is
that you don't just get this model catalog
where you have this list of models,
but of course you can also inspect those different models
and learn more about them.
For example, if I inspect the Google Gemma 3,
27 billion parameters model here,
which is just one possible model
you could run locally as well,
you get such a model card
and every model hosted on Hugging Face has such a card.
And this card simply describes the model.
It describes the capabilities of this model, for example,
that the Gemma model is multimodal.
It can handle text and image input.
It describes the context window and anything else
the provider of that model, Google, in this case,
felt worth sharing.
So it's a good way to understand what a model can do.
You'll also find some code examples
on how you could use this model in your code,
though I'll get back to using these models locally,
including programmatically a little bit later
in this course.
And you'll also learn more about the size of this model,
so the number of parameters it has.
So that would be 27 billion parameters here
for this Gemma 3 27 billion model.
The data type of these parameters
and some other things to which I'll get back later,
which are important to understand when it comes
to running these models locally on your system.
But again, I will get back to that later.
The key takeaway here is
that this Hugging Face models catalog is the place
to go to explore all available open models
you could consider running locally or on your own servers.
It's there for all as a great place to explore
not just the big well-known model providers
and their models, but also more niche
or upcoming open models that might be worth exploring.