Among the product launches that Google’s I/O conference has seen so far, perhaps the biggest breakthrough comes with the release of PaLM 2, Google’s next generation language model, and the company’s answer to ChatGPT.
PaLM 2 is a state-of-the-art language model with improved multilingual, reasoning and coding capabilities.
Google has trained PaLM2 on multilingual text, with over 100 languages.
“This has significantly improved its ability to understand, generate and translate nuanced text — including idioms, poems and riddles — across a wide variety of languages, a hard problem to solve,” explained Zoubin Ghahramani,Vice President of Google DeepMind, noting that PaLM2 passes advanced language proficiency exams at the “mastery” level.
Its dataset includes scientific papers and web pages that contain mathematical expressions. “As a result, it demonstrates improved capabilities in logic, common sense reasoning, and mathematics.”
PaLM2 was also trained on publicly available source code datasets, meaning it excels at popular programming languages like Python and JavaScript, but can also generate specialised code in languages like Prolog, Fortran and Verilog.
Ghahramani explained that PaLM 2 is available in four sizes, with the smallest able to run on mobile devices.
At the I/O conference, Google showcased over 25 new products and features powered by PaLM 2, including Workspace features for Gmail and Google Docs, and organising in Google Sheets. PaLM 2 is also powering Duet AI for Google Cloud, a generative AI collaborator.
Med-PaLM 2, can “answer questions and summarise insights from a variety of dense medical texts. It achieves state-of-the-art results in medical competency, and was the first large language model to perform at “expert” level on U.S. Medical Licensing Exam-style questions,” according to Ghahramani.
“We’re now adding multimodal capabilities to synthesise information like x-rays and mammograms to one day improve patient outcomes. Med-PaLM 2 will open up to a small group of Cloud customers for feedback later this summer to identify safe, helpful use cases.”
Sec-PaLM is a specialised security version that Ghahramani says is a potential leap for cybersecurity analysis. “Available through Google Cloud, it uses AI to help analyse and explain the behaviour of potentially malicious scripts, and better detect which scripts are actually threats to people and organisations in unprecedented time.”
Developers can now sign up to use the PaLM 2 model, and customers can use the model in Vertex AI “with enterprise-grade privacy, security and governance.”
