Google revealed at Google I/O on May 10, 2023, PaLM 2 (API, paper), its latest AI language model that powers 25 Google products, including Search, Gmail, Docs, Assistant, Translate, and Photos.

  • PaLM 2 has 4 models that differ in size: Gecko, Otter, Bison, and Unicorn. Gecko is so lightweight that it can work on mobile devices.
  • PaLM 2 can be finetuned on domain-specific knowledge (Sec-PaLM with security knowledge, Med-PaLM 2 with medical knowledge)
  • Bard now works with PaLM 2; with extensions, Bard can call tools like Sheets, Colab for coding, Lenses, Maps, Adobe Firefly to create images, etc.; Bard is multimodal and can understand images
  •  PaLM 2 is also powering Duet AI for Google Cloud, a generative AI collaborator designed to help users learn, build and operate faster
  • PaLM 2 is released in 180+ regions and countries, however, e.g. not yet in Canada, and in the EU
  • The next model, Gemini, is already in training. 
  • Google also announced the availability of MusicLM, a text-to-music generative model. 

OpenAI reacted to this announcement on May 12 by announcing that Browsing & Plugins are rolled out over the subsequent week for all Plus users. As of May 17, I can confirm that both features are now operational for me.