PaLM 2

PaLM 2 was released by Google in 2023 as a successor to PaLM, with significantly improved multilingual understanding, reasoning capabilities, and coding skills. Unlike the original PaLM, which was primarily demonstrated in English-centric tasks, PaLM 2 was trained on a much broader set of languages and powered Google's Bard chatbot and Workspace AI features.

PaLM 2 served as the backbone for Google's Bard conversational AI and various Google Workspace AI features, including draft-writing tools in Gmail and Google Docs. It was also offered to developers through Google Cloud's Vertex AI platform under model size variants like Gecko, Otter, Bison, and Unicorn.

Google announced PaLM 2 in four sizes — Gecko, Otter, Bison, and Unicorn — designed for different deployment scenarios from lightweight on-device use to large-scale cloud applications. The smallest, Gecko, was noted as lightweight enough to run on mobile devices while still performing capable reasoning.

Google positioned PaLM 2 as a competitor to OpenAI's GPT-4, emphasizing its superior multilingual coverage and integration into Google's ecosystem like Workspace and Bard. However, independent benchmarks generally found GPT-4 still leading in certain reasoning and coding tasks during 2023.