PaLM 2 reaches Bard as language and image features roll out separately

Google announced PaLM 2 on 10 May, saying the language-model family powers more than 25 products and features. Its I/O account identifies four sizes, from Gecko to Unicorn, and says the models were trained on text spanning more than 100 languages.

Photo: Anthony Quintano, “Google at the 2012 Democratic National Convention North Carolina”. Taken 6 September 2012. CC BY 2.0. Resized and cropped. Historical Google display; no endorsement implied.

The Bard announcement shows how that capability reaches users. Bard has moved to PaLM 2, drops its waitlist and opens to more than 180 countries and territories. Japanese and Korean are newly available alongside English; support for 40 languages is still planned.

Training coverage doesn’t establish that the same language is supported in the released interface.

Bard’s image prompts are also described as coming soon, using Google Lens. The model change and the image-input rollout therefore have different timelines.

Google says the smallest model, Gecko, can work on mobile devices even offline.