Enlarge (credit: Google)

On Wednesday, Google introduced PaLM 2 , a family of foundational language models comparable to OpenAI's GPT-4 . At its Google I/O event in Mountain View, California, Google revealed that it already uses PaLM 2 to power 25 products, including its Bard conversational AI assistant.

As a family of large language models (LLMs), PaLM 2 has been trained on an enormous volume of data and does next-word prediction, which outputs the most likely text after a prompt input by humans. PaLM stands for "Pathways Language Model," and " Pathways " is a machine-learning technique created at Google. PaLM 2 follows up on the original PaLM , which Google announced in April 2022.

According to Google, PaLM 2 supports over 100 languages and can perform "reasoning," code generation, and multi-lingual translation. During his 2023 Google I/O keynote, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that PaLM 2 comes in four sizes: Gecko, Otter, Bison, Unicorn. Gecko is the smallest and can reportedly run on a mobile device. Aside from Bard, PaLM 2 is behind AI features in Docs, Sheets, and Slides.

Enlarge / Android Studio will get a dedicated helper chatbot called Studio Bot. (credit: Google )

During today's I/O presentation, Google announced Studio Bot, an AI assistant that Android developers can use to help write and debug code.

Built on Codey and the revised PaLM 2 large language model, Studio Bot is only available to US developers for now and is in its "very early days," Google said. It's part of Android Studio, Google's official integrated development environment (IDE) for Android devs.

This is distinct from another Codey-based project that is meant to compete directly with GitHub's Copilot at completing and generating in-line code.