Google launches PaLM 2 across more than 25 products and features
PaLM 2 emphasized multilingual, reasoning, and coding capabilities and launched across Bard, Workspace, Google Cloud, and other products.
What happened
Event details
On May 10, 2023, Google introduced PaLM 2 at I/O. Google said the family was trained across more than 100 languages and improved reasoning, mathematics, and coding. Product tiers were named Gecko, Otter, Bison, and Unicorn. At launch, PaLM 2 powered more than 25 Google products and features; developers could apply for PaLM API access, while enterprise customers could use it through Vertex AI. The PaLM 2 technical report describes a Transformer-based family trained with a mixture of objectives but does not disclose its actual parameter counts. The report explicitly says that its 400-million-to-15-billion-parameter scaling-law experiments do not represent PaLM 2 model sizes. The former 340B catalog figure therefore had no support in Google’s published material.
Assessment
Why it matters
PaLM 2 quickly reached Google consumer, productivity, and cloud products, giving it broad market and ecosystem impact, although Gemini replaced it as the long-term model family.
Availability
Access notes
At launch, PaLM 2 was already used in Google products; developers could apply for the PaLM API, and enterprise customers could access it through Vertex AI.