The Google I/O 2023 event brought us some fascinating news about the latest advances in AI, including PaLM 2.
The Google I/O 2023 event brought about some fantastic announcements. We were finally introduced to the latest Pixel hardware, which includes the Pixel 7a, Pixel Fold and the first-of-its-kind Pixel Tablet.
The company also made sure to keep us updated on all the latest software advancements, with features like Google Help Me Write, Android 14 and Search Supercharged. Google is clearly putting AI at the forefront of its business, and Google PaLM 2 in particular. In essence, PaLM 2 is the latest AI language model and a new rival to systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4.
What is Google PaLM 2?
PaLM 2 is a language model developed by Google that aims to bring AI smarts to some of Google’s most popular apps, such as Gmail, Google Docs and Bard.
The company claims that PaLM 2 has improved reasoning abilities since it was trained on a wide data set that included scientific and mathematical papers and web pages. It can understand over 100 languages, pass advanced language proficiency exams at a “mastery” level and is able to understand nuanced text, like poems, idioms and riddles.
It could be a great asset to developers and programmers as it was also trained on a large quantity of publicly available source code data sets. This resulted in PaLM 2 understanding programming languages such as Python and JavaScript.
Where is PaLM 2 being used?
Google announced that PaLM 2 will be powering over 25 different Google Products, with the most notable addition being the Bard Chatbot.
Google Workspace apps like Gmail, Google Docs and Google Sheets will benefit from improved AI. There are also specific sub-sections of PaLM 2, which include Med-PaLM 2 and Sec-PaLM 2.
Med-PaLM 2 has been trained with medical knowledge and can achieve state-of-the-art results in medical competency, being the first AI model to perform at an “expert” level in US Medical Licensing Exam-style questions.
Sec-PaLM 2 is a specialised version of PaLM 2 that has been trained on security use cases. It is available through Google Cloud and can help analyse and explain potentially malicious scripts.
Google specified that PaLM 2 is a family of products, which means that the company will be able to deploy it for a wide range of use cases. PaLM 2 will be available in four sizes from the smallest to largest: Gecko, Otter, Bison and Unicorn. Gecko is small enough that it can be used in mobile devices, with enough power that it can improve interactive applications even when it is offline.
