one year on
Google unveils PaLM 2 and expands Bard to new languages at I/O 2023
At its annual developer conference, Google introduces PaLM 2, says it powers over 25 new products and features, and expands Bard to new languages alongside AI features in Gmail, Google Docs and Google Sheets.
Google announced PaLM 2, its next-generation language model, during the I/O 2023 keynote today, alongside a slew of AI-infused product updates. The company says PaLM 2 demonstrates improved multilingual, reasoning, and coding capabilities, and is available in four sizes—Gecko, Otter, Bison, Unicorn—with Gecko being lightweight enough to work on mobile devices.
At I/O today, Google says over 25 new products and features are powered by PaLM 2. Bard expands to new languages, and Workspace features in Gmail, Google Docs and Google Sheets tap into PaLM 2.
Zoubin Ghahramani, VP at Google DeepMind, emphasized that PaLM 2 is not simply ‘bigger is better’ but benefits from architectural innovations and efficient training. In the post, Ghahramani says Google is already at work on Gemini, which is still in training and is ‘already exhibiting multimodal capabilities never before seen in prior models.’
The record
One year later — open only if you can handle spoilers
PaLM 2 became the foundation for many Google products over the following year, while Gemini launched in late 2023. Google's aggressive AI push at I/O 2023 marked a turning point in the competitive landscape against OpenAI and Microsoft.