At the end of the day it doesn't matter how good it its, it has no system prompt which means no steerability, a sliding window for incredibly slow inference compared to similar sized models because it's too niche and most inference systems have high overhead implementations of it, and Google's psychotic instruct tuning that made Gemma 2 an inconsistent and unreliable glass cannon.
I mean hell, even Mistral added system prompts in their last release, Google are the only ones that don't seem to bother with it by now.
If you actually looked at gemma-3 you’ll see that it does support system prompts.
I’ve never seen a case where putting the system prompt in the user prompt would lead to significantly different outcomes though. Would like to see some examples.
(edit: my bad. i stand corrected. it seems the code just prepends the system prompts to the first user prompt.)
It matters as a common standard for model integration. System messages aren't removed when regular context messages start to get cut, the model pays more attention to tools and other directives defined there. Like situational context, language it should use, type of responses, etc. OAI/Anthropic give their models system prompts a mile long to tune their behaviour to a T.
There's also the ideological camp with Hartford and Nous and the rest where models are supposed to be trained as generally as possible, with the system prompt being strictly followed to adapt it to specific use cases.
I've read the Gemma 3 technical report, it doesn't mention anything about it in the format section. Did they forget to include that? Where did you find the source that claims otherwise?
I mean hell, even Mistral added system prompts in their last release, Google are the only ones that don't seem to bother with it by now.