PaLM
Pathways Language Model, Google's large-scale language model that preceded Gemini and demonstrated strong reasoning and multilingual capabilities.
What is PaLM?
PaLM, short for Pathways Language Model, was Google's flagship language model before Gemini. Released in 2022, PaLM featured 540 billion parameters and showcased breakthrough capabilities in reasoning and chain-of-thought problem solving. PaLM 2, released in 2023, powered Bard (now Gemini) and Google's various AI products before the transition to the Gemini architecture.
How PaLM Worked
PaLM was built on the Pathways system, Google's infrastructure for training models across thousands of TPU chips efficiently. This scale let it achieve capabilities that smaller models couldn't match. PaLM showed particular strength in logical reasoning, math, and code. The chain-of-thought prompting technique, where you ask the model to show its reasoning step by step, was especially effective with PaLM.
When PaLM Was Used
PaLM 2 powered a wide range of Google products. It ran Bard before the Gemini rebrand. It powered the AI features in Google Docs, Gmail, and Workspace. Med-PaLM was fine-tuned for medical applications. Sec-PaLM handled security analysis. While Gemini has now replaced PaLM as the flagship, PaLM's influence shaped how Google approached multimodal AI development.
Strengths and Legacy
PaLM proved that Google could compete at the frontier of language models. Its reasoning capabilities were genuinely impressive, and it showed the value of massive scale done right. The limitation was that it remained primarily a language model. Gemini's native multimodality represents the evolution beyond PaLM's text-focused approach. For understanding Google's AI trajectory, PaLM was the crucial bridge between earlier research and today's multimodal systems.