Gemma in Model Garden Deployment - confusing section on Chat Applications

[afirstenberg]

Environment

• Deployed a gemma-7b-it model on Vertex AI Model Garden using the "Deploy" button from the Gemma card. No additional tuning was done.
• I have an instance running on a g2-standard-12 machine with I4 GPU. It is visible in the Online Prediction section of my Cloud Console.
• I am able to reach the endpoint without any issues.

Unable to find any good documentation on what needs to be sent to the model and what to get back, I used the "Model Garden Gemma Deployment on Vertex" notebook to try and get an idea. (See #2799 for a related issue.)

Description:

• The instructions in the section "Build chat applications with Gemma" indicate that there are templates that define the structure of a conversation.
• The code shows how to use the template to create a prompt.
• However, the prompt that is created isn't sent to the model. Instead, the text from a previous example is.
• Furthermore, even if I do send the text to the model, it doesn't seem to respond any differently.
• As with #2799, the response format that is to be expected isn't documented.

See starting https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/vertex-ai-samples/blob/b37ed6e53c9d4e63b5e663b3a3d3d08bb7f73ac2/notebooks/community/model_garden/model_garden_gemma_deployment_on_vertex.ipynb#L667

[gericdong]

@kathyyu-google: could you please assist with this? Thanks.