The Gemma series is an amazing set of highly performant open-weight models. They have proven extremely effective in industrial settings where site-deployed agents need exactly this as a base for domain-specific fine-tuning that even Fable-class models cannot match in accuracy.
Presumably the Gemma team has been excellent at “distilling” from the Gemini-class models to get such capabilities.
This is a $25T category. Remember, the “frontier” is not spherical. It is extremely jagged, and it isn’t just among the trillion-parameter group.