Falcon 2 vs Gemma 7B

Falcon 2 11B vs Gemma 7B: 0.01 Apart on the Leaderboard

At release, Falcon 2 11B and Google Gemma 7B were separated by 0.01 on the Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard: 64.28 against 64.29. That is the smallest possible interesting difference, so it is worth being precise about what it means.

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The numbers

  • Falcon 2 11B: 64.28 average, 11B parameters.
  • Gemma 7B: 64.29 average, 7B parameters.
  • Source: the Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard as reported at Falcon 2 launch.

Why 0.01 is not a ranking

A 0.01 average difference is inside the noise of most evaluation setups. Reporting it as first and second place is a marketing reading of the leaderboard, not a statistical one. Both models were, for practical purposes, level at that moment.

The meaningful difference is cost: Gemma 7B is a smaller model, so it needs less memory and usually answers faster for the same hardware.

What actually separates them

  • Licence: Gemma ships under Google's Gemma terms of use; Falcon 2 uses the TII Falcon License 2.0.
  • Vision: Gemma 7B is text only; Falcon 2 offers a VLM on the same backbone.
  • Ecosystem: Gemma has first-party tooling from Google; Falcon 2 relies on the general Hugging Face stack.

Related pages

Falcon 2 benchmarksFalcon 2 vs Llama 3 8BFalcon 2 vs Mistral 7B

Sources

falcon2.lol is an independent third-party site. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or operated by the Technology Innovation Institute, and it does not speak for TII. Every number on this page is attributed to the source listed above.

Falcon 2 11B vs Gemma 7B: 0.01 Apart on the Leaderboard