Instructions to use google/gemma-3-27b-it with libraries, inference providers, notebooks, and local apps. Follow these links to get started.
- Libraries
- Transformers
How to use google/gemma-3-27b-it with Transformers:
# Use a pipeline as a high-level helper from transformers import pipeline pipe = pipeline("image-text-to-text", model="google/gemma-3-27b-it") messages = [ { "role": "user", "content": [ {"type": "image", "url": "https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingface/documentation-images/resolve/main/p-blog/candy.JPG"}, {"type": "text", "text": "What animal is on the candy?"} ] }, ] pipe(text=messages)# Load model directly from transformers import AutoProcessor, AutoModelForImageTextToText processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained("google/gemma-3-27b-it") model = AutoModelForImageTextToText.from_pretrained("google/gemma-3-27b-it") messages = [ { "role": "user", "content": [ {"type": "image", "url": "https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingface/documentation-images/resolve/main/p-blog/candy.JPG"}, {"type": "text", "text": "What animal is on the candy?"} ] }, ] inputs = processor.apply_chat_template( messages, add_generation_prompt=True, tokenize=True, return_dict=True, return_tensors="pt", ).to(model.device) outputs = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=40) print(processor.decode(outputs[0][inputs["input_ids"].shape[-1]:])) - Inference
- HuggingChat
- Notebooks
- Google Colab
- Kaggle
- Local Apps
- vLLM
How to use google/gemma-3-27b-it with vLLM:
Install from pip and serve model
# Install vLLM from pip: pip install vllm # Start the vLLM server: vllm serve "google/gemma-3-27b-it" # Call the server using curl (OpenAI-compatible API): curl -X POST "http://localhost:8000/v1/chat/completions" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ --data '{ "model": "google/gemma-3-27b-it", "messages": [ { "role": "user", "content": [ { "type": "text", "text": "Describe this image in one sentence." }, { "type": "image_url", "image_url": { "url": "https://cdn.britannica.com/61/93061-050-99147DCE/Statue-of-Liberty-Island-New-York-Bay.jpg" } } ] } ] }'Use Docker
docker model run hf.co/google/gemma-3-27b-it
- SGLang
How to use google/gemma-3-27b-it with SGLang:
Install from pip and serve model
# Install SGLang from pip: pip install sglang # Start the SGLang server: python3 -m sglang.launch_server \ --model-path "google/gemma-3-27b-it" \ --host 0.0.0.0 \ --port 30000 # Call the server using curl (OpenAI-compatible API): curl -X POST "http://localhost:30000/v1/chat/completions" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ --data '{ "model": "google/gemma-3-27b-it", "messages": [ { "role": "user", "content": [ { "type": "text", "text": "Describe this image in one sentence." }, { "type": "image_url", "image_url": { "url": "https://cdn.britannica.com/61/93061-050-99147DCE/Statue-of-Liberty-Island-New-York-Bay.jpg" } } ] } ] }'Use Docker images
docker run --gpus all \ --shm-size 32g \ -p 30000:30000 \ -v ~/.cache/huggingface:/root/.cache/huggingface \ --env "HF_TOKEN=<secret>" \ --ipc=host \ lmsysorg/sglang:latest \ python3 -m sglang.launch_server \ --model-path "google/gemma-3-27b-it" \ --host 0.0.0.0 \ --port 30000 # Call the server using curl (OpenAI-compatible API): curl -X POST "http://localhost:30000/v1/chat/completions" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ --data '{ "model": "google/gemma-3-27b-it", "messages": [ { "role": "user", "content": [ { "type": "text", "text": "Describe this image in one sentence." }, { "type": "image_url", "image_url": { "url": "https://cdn.britannica.com/61/93061-050-99147DCE/Statue-of-Liberty-Island-New-York-Bay.jpg" } } ] } ] }' - Docker Model Runner
How to use google/gemma-3-27b-it with Docker Model Runner:
docker model run hf.co/google/gemma-3-27b-it
Tool usage?
Where is the tool usage/function calling in the template? Does gemma3 lack this capability?
According to Google, it supports Tool Calling. However, the template does not include tool calling, which is a bit strange.
The tokenizer_config.json file has nothing about tools or function_calling ???
looking into the Ollama git, it was confirmed that function calling is not included yet
https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/9680
Ah, I see the one post in that thread of someone who actually worked with Google team, so it's being 'looked into.' They probably shouldn't have added the function calling capability to their blog post then, sort of false advertising.
Gemma 3 is great at instructability. We did some testing with various prompts which include tool call definition and output definition and have gotten good results. That said, Gemma 3 does not come with a dedicated tool use token. We invite you to try your own styles. We didn't recommend one yet because we didn't want to bias your all experimentation and tooling. This continues to be top of mind for us though.
@Renu11 , Thanks for that information. If you wouldn't mind clarifying something (if only in my own confusion), I was under the impression that the use of a tool token was established and reinforced through post-training steps, in the same way that the "system", "assistant", and "user" roles are. If that is the case, wouldn't/shouldn't there be a standardized way of invoking the function_call feature to align with post-training methods and not really left up to experimentation?
We've achieved good performance with Function calling by specifying the function definitions and output format in the user message and relying in the instructability of the model. Please review this article for more details about Google Gemma 3 Function Calling Examples.