At Google I/O on Wednesday, the tech giant announced a new large language model: PaLM 2.

PaLM 2 is the next iteration of PaLM (which stands for Pathways Language Model), which was launched in April 2022. At the time, it was on the cutting edge, and hailed for its ability to parse jokes. To say it was soon overshadowed by GPT-3 and GPT-4, the models powering OpenAI's ChatGPT, would be an understatement. It was clobbered.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced four different sizes of PaLM 2: "Gecko," "Otter," "Bison," and "Unicorn." Gecko is agile enough to work on mobile devices even when offline.

PaLM 2 works in over 100 languages, and been fine-tuned for models designed for cybersecurity (Sec-PaLM 2) and medical knowledge (Med-PaLM 2).

As of today, PaLM 2 is available in preview and is now powering Google Bard.